Management

OpenText today announced that City of Madrid, Europe’s fifth largest city, has selected OpenText to manage its citizen service portals which serve the needs of more than 3.2 million residents and intranet which serves more than 23,000 staff. In addition to managing these portals to the OpenText Cloud, the City of Madrid uses OpenText Portal and OpenText WEM to manage its web services, including the City of Madrid visitor website; citizen sites offering comprehensive electronic citizen services such as taxation, contracts, business and employment applications and payments of fines, as well as approximately 100 specific use portals and the open data site that serves the entire citizen body, generating more than 12 million site visits per year. The city also uses the OpenText solution for the Madrid City Council intranet portal used by 23,000 staff daily.

The City of Madrid has been managing its portals on-premises since 2005, and was facing significant challenges, including limitations of the existing IT platform, aging hardware and outdated software which had exceeded its maintenance period. The city also needed to rationalize costs for hardware, license maintenance and platform administration. Beyond solving these existing issues, they sought a service that would allow their IT resources to focus on providing the best service to Madrid citizens, instead of taking care of maintenance tasks.

OpenText partner Indra implemented the new OpenText cloud content management and portals platform for City of Madrid. The project involved the migration of more than 500,000 elements containing city information for citizens and 150 integrated applications of portals and content management. The ambition and success of the project led OpenText to recognize it as the Most Innovative Customer Experience Management Project in the OpenText Elite Awards, presented at Enterprise World 2016. Every year, this award recognizes the most innovative and successful Enterprise Information Management (EIM) deployments.

“We are pioneers within the Spanish public sector in offering electronic citizen services, and we’ve based that on OpenText’s cloud platform model,” said Mercedes Lozano, Head of Portals and Content for the City of Madrid IT Area. “The City of Madrid’s web portals offer detailed information on municipal management; it’s the central point of access to services which include the electronic transmission of tax information and online applications, in full compliance with the relevant regulations. Since the project’s inception, the goal has been to maintain the highest levels of accessibility and usability on the City of Madrid’s web portals. We’ve received multiple awards for this in Spain, and we’ve been recognized in digital government rankings for United Nations capital cities.”

The first six months of the new platform have already revealed several key benefits to performance, raising service level availability to 99.5% and creating improved usage of the sites with higher average visit times, a 20% increase in navigation to additional pages after site entry and a 17% reduction in page abandonment.