Key reasons for embracing open source included avoiding expensive licence costs, incompatible hardware, and the lack of gateways for proprietary applications. Security concerns were addressed by the transparency of open source code and its ability to ensure data privacy.
Since then, the municipal administration of Schwäbisch Hall has modernised its IT infrastructure to move away from paper-based processes. With over 900 employees, it needed a system that would allow access to emails, appointments, contacts, and files from anywhere at any time. To achieve that, the team maintaining the IT system went from three people to six.
Initially, Schwäbisch Hall faced challenges in managing identities and access rights for employees and systems. The external system they relied on lacked in-house knowledge transfer, making maintenance and development difficult. To find a suitable solution, they searched for an open source identity management system that fulfilled the no-spy clause of the German Federal Ministry of the Interior. Univention was the only manufacturer that responded positively to their requirements.
The migration plan involved implementing Univention Corporate Server (UCS), an open source platform with a strong identity management system. They aimed to centralise user information and ensure a standardised administration procedure. Before the migration, extensive preparations were made, including setting up a test environment to simulate the migration process and clean up data inventory. The migration took place over the course of two days and was successfully completed by the city’s team.
Mathias Waack, Head of the Department for Organisation and IT at Schwäbisch Hall, discussed the city's IT infrastructure and digitalisation efforts with us.
While the city IT system is not fully open source, it relies on a mix of software products provided at the federal and state levels, many of which are Windows-based. Their strategy has been to migrate to Linux while ensuring compatibility with Windows systems so to keep benefitting from Lander level support. This complexity has led to a delay in the digitalisation of the city public services as it was impossible with their resource to handle everything themselves.
The main focus of Schwäbisch Hall's current digitalisation efforts is the implementation of a documentation management system to reduce paper usage. The city faces challenges in changing approval processes and organisational limitations when digitalising tasks and processes. Convincing people of the benefits of digitalisation requires patience and support from upper management. Especially considering the overhead work created by having both a paper and digital based system which need to function simultaneously.
Mathias Waack also explained that they are in contact with various organisations and private vendors to find suitable products, but there are limitations due to the competences repartition between federal and state level. As providers need to adapt to each Lander policy and requirements, the lack of standardisation hinders mobility of products and services for local administrations in Germany. Mathias sees potential benefits in establishing a single desktop environment from the German government based on a Linux distribution. This would simplify maintenance and support, reduce dependencies and improve territorial mobility for public sector employees and open source specialists. However, the fragmentation of customers at the federal level and the limited number of potential customers pose problems for the private sector that would need an organic approach to scaling.
Mathias suggests that the German national state could propose the use of a standardised desktop environment, as was done with the Onlinezugangsgesetz or the German Technical Inspection Association (TÜV) that ensures standardised car checks nationwide. Implementing similar standards for IT systems across cities could improve efficiency and collaboration and allow for the development of solutions for this reason. Ultimately, while there is no plan of moving back to proprietary solution for Schwäbisch Hall, Mathias advises for caution when deciding to move to open source. While it is necessary, to fulfil Germany’s recent requirements on digital sovereignty, the coordination between federal and state level still pose challenges and hinders alternative development to proprietary IT systems.