How Digital Government Becomes Reality

Digitalization is increasingly shaping public administration. With diverse stakeholders and extensive collections of citizen data, transparency, traceability, and structure have become essential. The City of Biel found the key to success in the EA suite ADOIT.

Introducing EA was a top priority for the City of Biel. Before work on a digital architecture could begin, the city first had to establish the legal framework for IT governance. The administration organized its digital portfolio into four main areas: population and economy, administration, urban space, and IT products. Each category includes various products managed by product owners, all essential to the enterprise architecture.

An external EA tool needed to support the TOGAF framework and use ArchiMate as its modeling language. Because Biel is bilingual, the tool also had to support multiple languages and offer interfaces to Active Directory and Microsoft Power BI.

“Since free tools didn’t meet all our requirements, we ran an invitation-only tender process,” explains Mourgue d’Algue. After a thorough evaluation, BOC Group’s EA suite ADOIT was awarded the contract.

• Full multilingual support (German, French)
• ArchiMate as the methodological modeling language
• Based on the TOGAF framework
• Interfaces to Active Directory, Microsoft Power BI, K2help, and more
• Security of SaaS services
• Efficient support and long-term maintenance

Hint: Experience the future of your enterprise architecture. Discover the many possibilities of the ADOIT EA suite today.

The City of Biel began procuring an EA tool in late 2021. Modeling of the information system started in 2022, with product owners responsible for capturing and modeling their own products and services. A key priority was avoiding an overly complex architecture that only highly specialized architects could understand. For this reason, the City of Biel adopted the principle of “just enough architecture.“

In late 2022, the “Archiboard” was established, bringing together C-level stakeholders including the Chief Application Officer, Chief Business Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Data Officer, Chief Technology Officer, and Chief Security Officer. This task force meets regularly to review the current state and ongoing development of the enterprise architecture, discuss changes and new solutions, and evaluate the evolving IT structure.

By early 2023, the administration was already working with ADOIT operationally and at scale, and began fine-tuning the system. The City of Biel also started building a technology roadmap around this time.

“We were able to structure our enterprise architecture around our product organization,” explains Mourgue d’Algue. The entire digital portfolio is now mapped in ADOIT. The City of Biel can maintain a unified, transparent architecture that every role can access, simple and easy to understand. This allows different stakeholders, including managers, reporting staff, data and security officers, and project leads, to bring together and visualize the information most relevant to them.

These varied perspectives have meaningfully improved transparency and collaboration across the administration. “With ADOIT, we put data at the center and connect business objects directly to the city’s services. This makes us less dependent on specific software solutions,” explains Chief Data Officer Marco Savini.

For the City of Biel, ADOIT has also proven to be a single source of truth, helping the administration answer key questions related to enterprise architecture, such as:

• What technologies are needed to meet business requirements?
• How can new technologies be seamlessly integrated into the existing IT landscape?
• How is data used and managed across the organization?
• Which data sources are critical to the business, and how are they protected?
• How can IT costs be optimized and reduced?
• What security risks exist, and how can they be minimized?
• How do changes affect business processes and structures?