Vienna provides space – digitalization of administrative proceedings

The municipal department of the city of Vienna, under a project called “Vienna Provides Space” is working to digitalize public areas. The goal of the program, which runs from 2017 to 2022, is to digitize processes for so-called special uses of public areas, all the way from application through official procedures and up to approval and settlement. It not only focuses on uses such as sidewalk cafés, advertising, events and markets, but also uses as part of construction sites. In addition to extensive organizational, legal and process changes, software tools are also being developed for all procedural steps (application via the city’s website, procedures, settlement and assessments).

The task

Spirit in Projects is working for the program on behalf of municipal department MA 01 (Wien Digital, the IT department of the city of Vienna). The Spirit in Projects team is accompanying the program in the overall analysis of business processes and requirements, and works together with the organizational units taking part in the program to gather details on current processes then define target processes. The requirements of specialized service departments were finally condensed into requirements specifications for the program’s software components (application portal, specialized information system for management, fee calculator for SAP, interface to a data warehouse).

The challenge

In the end, the particular complexity of the program lay in the large number of stakeholders – six different specialized service departments of the municipality have a direct hand in procedural management, and still other units take part as expert assessors and occasionally integrated units.

Our approach

To manage this complexity, Spirit in Projects successfully chose to use a participative approach including a large number of trade-off workshops in order to achieve maximum acceptance of the requirements which were gathered. The project will be implemented at the beginning of 2019.