Opera will help Copenhagen provide better service for unemployed

The Employment and Integration Department of the City of Copenhagen wanted one system that could provide IT support for all the processes in the job centres. Furthermore, the existing systems were so outdated that their blue screens and lack of user-friendliness didn’t exactly promote employee satisfaction.

However, generally speaking it was the time that went into pooling, checking and re-entering data in various systems that needed to be minimised – to the benefit of citizens, employees and the department. With the introduction of KMD Opera, the employees will only need to enter data once at one point in the system.

Time for the essential
“With KMD Opera we expect less processing time for the individual case, greater reliability for timely and correct case-handling, and also more time for the most important thing – namely helping citizens to get into work,” says Thomas Thellersen Børner, Director of the Employment and Integration Department of the City of Copenhagen.

“When the case-handler and citizens meet, it is therefore important to have more time to talk constructively about the situation rather than the case-handler sitting with his/her head in the screen clicking backwards and forwards between a mass of IT systems to find the right information.”

The users determine the structure
So why did the choice fall to KMD Opera? For the City of Copenhagen it was important not to have to force the existing organisation into a standard system. On the contrary, they carried out a bottom-up process where the employees were asked what requirements they had for a new system. The City of Copenhagen then went into an EU tender with this. KMD tendered Opera – albeit a customised version of Opera that could satisfy the 600 plus specifications that the City of Copenhagen ended up with. The specifications ranged from a desire for simple shortcut keys to templates for insightful business intelligence at a level that a local government of the size and complexity of the City of Copenhagen needs.

“In terms of content the system has satisfied the numerous requirements that we specified. The actual process has involved a new and different way of working for KMD and the City of Copenhagen where we have handled the various difficulties and challenges on an ongoing basis through our respective steering groups. For example, we appointed a taskforce that worked hard over Christmas 2008 to minimise certain response time problems. KMD demonstrated the required seriousness in the process of solving the problem – even though we're not 100% finished at this point," says Thomas Thellersen Børner.

All in all I expect KMD Opera, in tandem with the also newly implemented KMD Case, to contribute to a significant increase in the efficiency of our case-handling in the job centres. I'm convinced that it will also contribute to greater job satisfaction among the employees. And most important of all a better experience for the individual citizen who we're trying to support.”