With Cisco solutions and technical assistance provided by Conscia, the Sandefjord Municipality went from putting out fires on outdated IT equipment to becoming a pioneer in digitization among Norwegian municipalities.
In 2017, the Sandefjord, Stokke, and Andebu Municipalities were merged into a “new” Sandefjord Municipality, and the same year, Sondre Andersen was hired as the new IT chief for the municipality. The work of consolidating three data centers and three IT departments began.
Downtime and firefighting
The municipality’s IT solution was characterized by a lot of downtime. The administration of the various solutions in three locations was time-consuming and characterized by silos, they lacked monitoring, and the physical IT infrastructure was old and outdated. In short, they had fallen behind, so a major effort was needed to bring the municipality’s IT solutions up to a secure, user-friendly, and modern level.
“A survey was conducted, and the result showed that of what we already had in place, there was one good thing and that was the people in the organization. The rest had major deficiencies,” said Sondre Andersen, IT Chief at the Sandefjord Municipality.
The municipality wanted to go from troubleshooting and firefighting to being proactive in how they operated IT while also ensuring a high level of IT security, as Sondre Andersen explains:
“Everyone talks about the digital foundation, and we had a very poor digital foundation. So there’s no point in having grand ambitions for digitization when the basics are not in place.”
Responsibility and budgets
One of the challenges was getting the municipal leadership and politicians to accept the fact that nothing lasts forever. To provide good digital services to employees and residents, the IT department must receive funds for annual investments for the tactical replacement of equipment.
The mentality of the municipal leadership and politicians eventually shifted towards ICT being responsible for everything that happens, from the network being plugged into the wall to all the equipment reached on the other side, with matching budgets to replace equipment and ensure that everything works.
“When I saw the first presentation of Cisco’s solutions and understood what this was, I was captivated! I realized that this was the way to achieve a higher degree of automation and security and to build a solid digital foundation,” Sondre Andersen, IT Chief at the Sandefjord Municipality.
Let the employees get bored!
The Sandefjord Municipality aims to be a pioneer among Norwegian municipalities in digitization. They, therefore, wanted their new data center solution to be software-defined, with easy administration of all infrastructure. The infrastructure was to be located in two physical locations for full redundancy, ensuring maximum availability and uptime. They also wanted to automate and digitize as much as possible to reduce manual work, streamline, and save costs.
“My goal was for the IT employees to have time to “get bored” – that is, they should be proactive and anticipate any potential problems and have time to spend on development, not troubleshooting and firefighting.”
