City of Zurich: Award-winning reform of the IT strategy with the Malik Syntegration® method

Innovative strategy for overall reform of the municipal IT structure developed in 3.5 days

With the revolutionary Malik Syntegration® method, the city of Zurich’s IT and competence center managed to initiate a change project in 2006 that had been considered impossible due to its size and complexity. In just 3.5 days, roughly 40 key persons from the IT department and political staff of the city of Zurich developed 32 wholistic and innovative measures for a comprehensive reform of the city’s IT structure. The results set completely new standards, won many awards and were implemented effectively, unerringly, quickly, and reliably over the course of just two years as part of 80 partial projects thanks to the tools of the Syntegration method.

The key question for the Syntegration process was:

“How should we design the IT structure for the city of Zurich in order to generate the greatest possible sustainable benefits for our internal and external customers?”

Result overview:
» Highly complex IT renewal projects realized in just two years
» Transparency successfully ensured for IT projects that extend across departments
» Comprehensive strategy for overall reform of the municipal IT structure was developed in just 3.5 days
» Roughly 15.000 workplaces were equipped with standardized, radically new hardware and software
» Significant reduction from roughly 100 local operations centers to two large data centers
» As a result maximum increase in security and efficiency
» Key challenges were resolved optimally, quickly, and in a forward-looking manner
» Diverse requirements and demands were integrated into adopted measures in a superior manner
» Critics and opponents were successfully brought on board with the innovative social technology
» Determined perseverance instead of resignation; confidence instead of hopelessness

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