The Intranet for working well, together
For 20 years, Secoval’s business team, made up primarily of young, highly motivated and proactive individuals, has led the way in terms of innovation and development. It is the fully-fledged technological and operational arm of many forward-looking municipalities in the North-East Brescia area.
while daily comments increased by 45%, highlighting a greater engagement of people
for a total of over 35 activated communities
that makes 40 municipalities work well
The Comunità Montana Valle Sabbia Group recently centralised the digital transformation activities of its companies, with a view to helping the local Public Institutions manage taxes, the Local Information System, fibre optics, the land registry, the data centre and the “montano” cloud. To manage the processes of more than 40 municipalities more efficiently, Secoval needed a tool that would allow for a more horizontal and cross-cutting management. But not only that. The tool would also need to support the personnel of the investee companies and municipalities in their day-to-day collaboration, while giving new visibility to the data for more in-depth analytics. Luca Belli, Digital Transformation Manager of the Investee companies of Comunità Montana Valle Sabbia, explains:
“We needed a system that would digitise internal processes and external processes towards municipalities, customers and associates. At the same time, the need had arisen to replace some of the software that we were using for various purposes, such as CRM, managing support tickets and issuing quotations, each with their own logic. We saw in Interacta a tool that would bring all these activities together on one platform.”
Before Interacta, Secoval had already tried adopting other project management platforms, without noticing any real benefits in terms of user-friendliness and ease of communication management. Its ambition was to find a platform that would be easy to use, including by municipal employees, and which could bring together all coordination activities between the Group’s companies in an interactive and engaging way. Not to mention the need to have a team of experts on hand at all times, both during the project start-up phase and for ongoing support over time, keeping pace with the company’s naturally evolving needs.
The first activity to be completely migrated onto Interacta was the new ticketing system for receiving and managing IT support requests. Not long after, a link to the reporting community was enabled. This community is used by all the companies’ employees at the end of the day to report on tasks carried out. This was the spark that set the wheels in motion. So far, over 700 employees of the municipalities — who use the platform to post IT support requests — have been involved. At the same time, the reporting aspect has enabled the people working at the four companies of Comunità Montana Valle Sabbia to start using the platform on a daily basis, discovering all its advantages.
One year since the start of the project, there are over 35 active communities. These are designed to enable all departments of the companies involved to manage their internal communication, administration, projects and support requests, thus simplifying the collaboration and task management processes.
With so many companies in the Group, a tool was needed that would facilitate the passage of information between all the people and that would allow knowledge to circulate rapidly and in an engaging fashion from one office to another, and from one company to another. These goals were met thanks to:
Interacta was initially used with the aim of digitising IT ticketing requests, while also introducing the automated management of server and firewall problems: when errors occur, the system automatically opens a request to report the error event and allow prompt intervention by the IT area. It was also possible to automatically report on the tasks of the technical operators dealing with the tickets. This enabled close collaboration and increased the involvement of front users and back users, i.e. the municipal workers and the operators in charge of handling the requests.
The companies of the Comunità Montana Valle Sabbia Group — made up of Sae Valle Sabbia, Valle Sabbia Solidale, Consorzio Forestale di Valle Sabbia, as well as Secoval — access Interacta, also using several communities dedicated to ongoing projects, where all routine tasks are gathered together, giving everyone a comprehensive view of all tasks in progress at a glance.
Another requirement was to digitise the entire administrative management aspect, to have a single administration for all the companies, which would help them coordinate all the tasks of the 40 municipalities.
“This was done by creating six communities that interact with each other and enable us to digitally manage the entire workflow aspect in a simple way. This was previously done with separate tools, from email and Excel to an external software, and we struggled to keep track of all the information and tasks to be performed.”
The telephone enquiries of citizens for all matters related to energy efficiency and the waste collection system of the municipalities needed to be handled. Before Interacta, this activity was handled manually by the operators, who sorted the enquiries and routed them to the relevant operator. Thanks to Interacta, interoperability has now been enabled with the external application already used for call center management, which, when a call comes in, automatically enters the enquiry in Interacta with all the details needed to expedite enquiry handling activities and relieve operators of the burden of data collection.
One of Secoval’s core values is listening to the real needs of each municipality and of their people, with a view to continuous improvement. That’s why the company also places great emphasis on collecting feedback, with the aim of fine-tuning the communities according to user suggestions that arise from time to time. This means that no process is static just because “this is how it’s always been done”. In fact, according to Luca Belli, “adopting Interacta — bolstered also by the drive for digitisation of the Public Administrations throughout Italy — triggered a virtuous cycle in the management of all the activities of the different companies and municipalities.”
Results
Technology and digitisation can trigger a virtuous cycle for companies and people in organisations, including public ones.
Nobody is immune to the change. The change is across the board.
“Using Interacta, we’ve noticed myriad advantages over time. There was a degree of diffidence in the beginning, but now we’re often being asked to add more processes onto the platform.”
Technology and digitisation are our friends: to ride the digital transformation wave, people need to constantly nurture, strengthen and share their skills. This leads to engagement and has a positive impact within the organisation.
We asked Luca what companies can do to support people, including those working
in the public administrations (PAs):
“Companies need to assist people with support tools to close the “gap” between hard and soft skills. They need to prevent the skills curve from declining, also by using sharing and collaboration systems like Interacta.”
Another major result achieved by Secoval, and by all the other companies, concerns the relationship with the parent company, Comunità Montana Valle Sabbia. Belli explained this to us:
“With Interacta, the relationship improved, thanks to the streamlining of communication and internal flows. Before, various software programmes were used to manage the flows. The systems were not interconnected and communication between the companies was challenging. Now, the administrative and internal communication management processes are simple and streamlined, with more frequent and less formal interactions between people.”
What’s more, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) has opened up new opportunities to be seized for digitisation, which Italy's municipalities can use as a driver to proactively reinterpret change.
At Secoval, the adoption of Interacta, combined with the NRRP’s digitisation measures, has led to three major results:
In Interacta, Secoval found a tool that is able to digitise the processes of over 40 municipalities, simplifying collaboration between the companies and improving internal process management. By creating dedicated communities for Internal Communication, Administration, projects and IT ticketing requests, Secoval has achieved an optimised, cross-cutting management of its digitisation processes, enabling more in-depth data analytics and making the information usable also by municipal workers and other external stakeholders.
Outstanding results have been achieved over the past year. Compared to the previous year, the activities managed in Interacta have literally skyrocketed: the number of posts published per day has increased by 55%, while daily comments
have increased by 45%, pointing to greater user engagement and interaction.
The upward trend in these results highlights the positive adoption of Interacta by the
municipalities involved, confirming the benefits and importance of an optimised management of digital transformation processes.
Increased collaboration on a single, accessible platform: through the communities created in Interacta, the different companies involved in the project can manage their internal communication, administration, projects and support requests in a collaborative fashion, simplifying the task management processes as a result.
Prompt tracking of the task flow in the communities is a feature Secoval will no longer do without: “Before, it was hard to find out the progress status and who was in charge of the task. With Interacta, we completely eliminated the uncertainty of email and chat communications.”
The full automation of support requests from the municipalities resulted in areduction of more than 50 calls a day to the Secoval switchboard.
What’s more, the processes for requesting quotations and issuing orders are
managed entirely in Interacta, saving time, emails and printed paper.
