Open democratic arena
We have had a building fit for how we provided services in the past, not for how are services will be provided in the future. For a new city hall the main purpose was to create a democratic arena encouraging the public to participate in the decision making process earlier. A large part of the building was therefore created as a common arena open to everyone. The area contains meeting rooms, offices for political parties and the main chamber for the City Council. There is no need to register or have an appointment, you will be met digitaly and can use the area as you see fit.
We needed to change the way we meet our visitors coming for meetings or services provided by the municipality. Previously we have met citizens in a traditional way with a staffed reception and asked them to register on a screen. We looked for a solution that was more flexible and gave the impression of solving challenges together with our citizens.
Mobility
The new city hall has been built in the city center without parking. The consequence is that we needed to find alternative transportation for employees to travel within working hours. In addition to travel within working hours we looked for a solution where we could provide cars for employees to rent in the afternoon. The idea being that we would optimize our own cars, reduce the need for private cars amongst employees and reduce the number of cars left in the city center at night.
Process improvement through automation
For the future we know that we will need to provide the same services as we do today with less funding. Instead of doing more of the same, we needed to look at other was of solving some of our municipal tasks in an more effective way. Robotic automation processes (RPA) has the potential to solve a part of this need and was implemented to solve tasks within archive, HR and financial services. Through the usage of RPA we wanted to improve processes and found that that the solution was very effective for realizing potential.