First, we attempted to explore the challenges facing data-driven management within the municipality. This was done by looking for answers to underlying questions, such as the types of data processes that the future data integration platform should be able to support, and where does the current infrastructure fall short in supporting data processes.

To answer such questions, we interviewed a total of 50 stakeholders from the social departments, public works departments, financial departments, and others. From these interviews, we derived a proper sense of the problem as well as what should the solution deliver.

Based on the results obtained from the interviews, we drafted a blueprint consisting of three architectural parts:

• The conceptual architecture: This part illustrates the role and intended use of the data integration platform within the City’s organization.
• The logical architecture: It describes on a functional level, the various components and functionalities required in the platform, as well as the demarcation of the data platform (i.e. what is considered to be out-of-scope).
• The physical architecture: describes a mapping of the functional components described in the logical architecture to actual and concrete products. In this part, we compared cloud-native solutions with state-of-the-art Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions offered by market leaders across product categories following Gartner’s magic quadrants.

The blueprint was iteratively refined together with the stakeholders through focus groups, sprint reviews, and a final document review.

The blueprint for the data integration architecture is currently implemented in the City’s new Cloud Competence Center. It will roughly serve 80% of the future and current data processes within the City, and will be the seed for the data-driven policy within the municipality.

The City continues its collaboration with Xomnia on the implementation of generic data pipelines and data-driven management services for the various departments and stakeholders within the city.

In addition to the blueprint, the collaboration also helped give rise to important questions that will hopefully trigger a more broad and ambitious data-related strategies. Examples of those questions include:

• What does having a future-proof data platform mean to the City?
• How is it possible to use it to facilitate compliance with laws and regulations (such as GDPR) and others as much as possible?
• How can the City responsibly make use of data driven algorithms to help identify potential causes for concern in tackling the pandemics, climate change, or organized crime and cybercrime?

The municipality’s capability to deal with such problems is growing every day, as the data foundation is being built incrementally. Future projects can rely on this foundation and their success will be amplified by the functionality offered by the fast, easy, secure, and well-managed exchange of data of the new platform.