“Inetum not only supports and unburdens us in the development and management of a modern, future-proof ICT environment, but by regularly advising and inspiring us, they create space for innovation and stimulate it as well,” explains IT Manager Frederik Hellyn.

Frederik and his team like to experiment with new technology, especially if it can benefit the operation of the city departments and their services. "In turn, we share the useful experiences we gain in this way with Inetum. So you could call it a productive, reciprocal relationship."

From PCs to Sensors

Today, the City of Harelbeke’s IT team, including Frederik himself, has seven full-time employees. "We support some 750 end users, which is quite a challenge," says Hellyn, “because those IT users are not only spread across twenty different locations, but also have very different profiles, ranging from administration to management, from nursing personnel in assisted living homes to teaching personnel in schools, and from the art schools where they use Macs to the green crews working on tablets on the go.”

"For all these different end-users, we’re responsible for the first-line support for anything and everything IT-related. And these days, that’s a lot," emphasizes the IT manager. He cites the example of some smart city projects in his own city. "We use sensors to measure and compare the temperature in the different streets during the summer months, for example, or to map the energy and water consumption of our own city departments."

Pioneering in the Cloud

An additional challenge is that new forms of work such as flexi-working and working from home have now also found their way into public administrations. "In that, too, we were a forerunner," Hellyn recalls. "We decided very early on to move to the cloud. In fact, in our region, we were the first public administration to migrate its office environment to Office 365."

The City of Harelbeke wanted to invest in the new way of working, in part also to make itself more attractive as an employer. The challenge for the IT team was to get together the tools needed to make this possible. "When the COVID crisis broke out in March 2020 and suddenly made working from home an obligation, our organization was already prepared for it. Everyone had Teams on their PC and could already work with it." Pioneering work can pay off faster than anticipated.

Power Tools for Reporting (and more)

Quite soon after the Office migration to Azure, the IT team faced a new challenge. "We clearly needed a good reporting tool. This initially involved only financial reporting." But once the move to Power BI had been made and the rest of Microsoft’s Power Platform had also been revealed to the team, the ball quickly started rolling.

Meanwhile, the City of Harelbeke’s IT team has developed a full-fledged BI environment based on Power BI, with all kinds of in-house-made dashboards and reports. At the same time, the team makes full use of the umbrella Power Platform's extensive possibilities to develop all kinds of Power Apps of their own, and have already replaced some old Access databases.                                                                                                          

“At the request of our Environment and Nature Department, for example, there is now also an app for registering stray cats,” Hellyn adds. “Previously, this registration was done in Excel, which of course was not that efficient.” It sent emails back and forth between the city, the police and the animal shelter. “And I’m not even talking about the many different versions of such a file circulating over time. Thanks to our app, information about stray cats now flows smoothly to the animal shelter and to the police, who will also be able to enter the necessary information on the registration platform."

Telephony and Backup also in the Cloud

The strategic choice of the City of Harelbeke to standardize on Microsoft technology and the associated ecosystems has also influenced the choice of other technology suppliers and partners to some extent. "For example, it was a logical decision for us to add TendFor to our Teams telephony for the reception function. All employees who we were able to switch to cloud telephony smoothly and securely are already using Teams to make calls. This frees them from being bound to a fixed device for that reception function. With TendFor, our employees can now even take on that critical function from home."

Speaking of critical functions, the City of Harelbeke also partnered with a Microsoft technology partner for its Office 365 backup. "We rely on Inetum’s advice when purchasing systems and applications essential to our operations and services. For cloud telephony, they recommended Teams in combination with TendFor, and for cloud backup, they recommended AvePoint." The City of Harelbeke was very happy to take that recommendation to heart, since they had already been using this data security specialist's solutions for some time.

“In fact, we were AvePoint’s first public administration customer in Belgium,” says Hellyn. "Because we moved to the cloud earlier than all the other administrations, we also had to look for a suitable backup solution for that new IT environment. We have now renewed our choice of AvePoint specifically for cloud-to-cloud backup. The decisive factor was their having the widest range on the market and including Teams Planner app data in their backups, for example. Since we record all our projects in Planner, we really need that extra backup."

Next Challenge: AI?

With the introduction of Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant, another new challenge is already presenting itself. "We were the first public administration in our region to move to Office 365 and Power BI. We were also one of the first to develop Power Apps. I am very pleased that we were once again one of the first to buy a number of Copilot licenses."

For now, experiments with Copilot are limited to simple applications such as creating meeting transcripts and summaries, but Frederik Hellyn and his team are already looking beyond that, too. For example, they are exploring the possibilities that Copilot offers within Excel to analyze data and convert it into graphs. “Eventually, we would also like to extend the development of Power BI dashboards and Power Apps to our users. Right now, this is still mainly done centrally, within our IT team. Who knows, maybe Copilot can add value to realizing this as well."