The Bavarian District Assembly Shapes Digital Cultural Change with Intrakommuna
The Bavarian District Assembly offers employees in the administrations of the seven Bavarian districts a tool from Intrakommuna, which allows them to organize their collaboration much more efficiently than with emails, leaving them more time for meaningful tasks.
Thomas Pfister is not one for exaggerations. “When I explain at a training that participants can save half of their working time through the use of digital tools, they don’t believe me,” explains the digital consultant at the Bavarian District Assembly. There, Pfister implements digitalization in persistent, small steps. This way, his colleagues experience how much the digital transformation eases their daily work.
The Bavarian District Assembly is the municipal association of the seven districts in Bavaria. The association informs and advises the districts and represents their common interests to the state parliament, the state government, state authorities, other corporations, associations, and other institutions. It also represents its members in the annual financial equalization discussions with the Bavarian Ministry of Finance, in which the state’s contributions to the financing of the districts are negotiated. The District Assembly also directly participates in the legislative process in Bavaria through its right to be heard. In addition, it is represented in numerous national and federal committees and organizations, where it advocates the interests of the districts.
Intrakommuna Has Experience with Digitalization in Authorities
When Thomas Pfister wanted to make the collaboration of his colleagues in the administrations of the seven Bavarian districts easier with a digital tool five years ago, he also asked the digital consultants of the Bavarian County and City Day which collaboration tool they could recommend. They recommended the platform from Intrakommuna. “We could have worked with other tools, but often those providers couldn’t name any authorities as reference customers – Intrakommuna could,” recalls Pfister. This, among other aspects, was a decisive reason. Because the Bavarian District Assembly did not want to be the first customer from the public sector.
With the platform, Thomas Pfister also found a digital solution that makes collaboration in the district administrations more efficient and effective, and thus gently prepares colleagues for the digital transformation and its requirements. Instead of with emails, employees today organize themselves on the Intrakommuna platform in working groups on topics such as taxes, district elections, cultural administration, or electronic legal transactions. In the respective groups, members post invitations to meetings, store protocols of working meetings or documents in the Wiki/Files directory, or conduct discussions about pending problems and how to solve them in the respective districts.
The Intrakommuna Platform Facilitates Collaboration
“This is successful because Intrakommuna offers not just a document storage, a cloud space, or a forum, but a tool that combines a variety of important communication functions on one platform,” explains digital consultant Thomas Pfister. This makes the platform not only a collaboration tool, but also a storage of information at a central location on the Internet – a tool, in perspective, also for knowledge management. “In the long term, I also want to use the platform at the Bavarian District Assembly with the district administrations,” says Thomas Pfister. However, it is essential to take the employees in the districts along on this path and not to overwhelm them.
“These employees already experience in the working groups and circles on the Intrakommuna platform how much digitalization makes their work easier,” Pfister is pleased to say. “We receive consistently positive feedback for the district network built on the platform.”
The Collaboration on the Intrakommuna Platform Puts an End to Email Madness
The greatest gain for his colleagues is that the Intrakommuna platform has put an end to the “email madness” in collaboration and now allows them to communicate in real time with everyone who matters on a topic, across all seven districts in an overarching network, and manage documents centrally. “Previously, colleagues were drowning in a flood of emails and often had no overview of the information that was important to them and those they did not need,” describes digital consultant Pfister the overwhelm that arises from the conventional way of working in many offices.
Pfister is convinced that collaboration cannot be productively organized with emails in the increasingly complex world. “If I ask 20 people with an email whether they can attend a date, and only a part of them declines and suggests alternatives, I am overwhelmed with the feedback. How am I supposed to coordinate a date without investing a massive amount of working time just for that,” illustrates Thomas Pfister the problem. It becomes even greater if some of the respondents send their refusal and the reasoning for it to all others. Then they also overwhelm these colleagues with information that is not significant for them.
“On the Intrakommuna Platform, Communication Gets a Red Thread”
On the platform of Intrakommuna, a date suggestion, the draft of a protocol, or a document can be posted at a central location on the Internet. There, all affected can react and comment on it. Contributions can also be assigned to specific user groups or topics. “This gives communication a red thread. When a new post is made, everyone is immediately informed, as the system sends corresponding information to the group members. Because information is stored at a central location, it can also be found at any time and nothing gets lost anymore,” clarifies Thomas Pfister the added value of working with a platform for digital collaboration like Intrakommuna.
To make searching for content and thus accessing the knowledge accumulated on the platform even more efficient, the digital consultant of the Bavarian District Assembly is currently introducing hashtags in its network. “This way, topics and contents can be tagged as users know from Instagram or other social media products,” explains Thomas Pfister. The interface of the Intrakommuna tool is also familiar to many employees in the authorities, as it reminds them of the social networks they know from their private lives. “With the mostly very old, form-based applications of the public service, which still treat the desktop as a terminal in an IT architecture, especially younger colleagues often feel uncomfortable,” reports Thomas Pfister. To take them along with all other employees in the seven districts on the path of digital change, it needs continuous and persistent small steps. With exaggerations or too high speed, this does not work, Thomas Pfister is convinced.
