Business Intelligence Testimonial

Guy WUILLERET

Head of the Organisation and Informatics Service

City of Lausanne

THE CONTEXT

The City of Lausanne is a public communal administration with 4'200 staff, which offers very varied services to its "clients", be they simple citizens, or companies and other organisations.

Guy Wuilleret is the head of the Organisation and Informatics Service which is responsible for the management, development and maintenance of the communal information system, as well as the support for all of the computer users of the City of Lausanne. In this capacity, he manages a team of 75 people, as well as ca. 10 external consultants for specific projects.

THE REQUIREMENT

When Guy Wuilleret contacts Valthicha, he has an important project to manage: the creation of a shared data "hub" within the information system, which must be perfectly synchronised with the external data sources.

Each of the different services of the City of Lausanne stores its data and business processes independenly of all the others – over 100 different domaines have been inventoried, from electricity distribution to security and police services, communal back-office, construction authoritiy, public schooling and more…

But each of these databases contains much similar information, which implies repeated, manual input and increased maintenance, even in the cases where interfaces can be implemented. The objective is therefore to create a unique, centralised, database, which contains all common data, which is then interfaced with each of the domain-specific applications – which must be allowed to retain their specificity. The challenge is to maintain the data in one format and to distribute them quasi-simultaneously while transforming them, because the different target applications cannot integrate arbitrary data formats.

THE RESULT

Valthicha proposed using Oracle's ODI tool (aka. Sunopsis), because it allows for real-time synchronisation, with simultaneous transformation, of data to adapt them to the target databases, as well as a complementary solution for the host, DB Connect.

The implementation of this multi-server platform (Access, DB2, SQLS …) also allowed the creation of later data migrations, while conserving their format, when applications needed to be changed.

"Valthicha was able to find the appropriate resources for the implementation of our project," said Guy Wuilleret, referring to the three consultants who worked on the project, "and we were able to organise this significant change while staying within budget and deadline. Valthicha has an 'aggressively competitive' commercial approach as regards to costs, for services as well as tools  – and this is very important for a public administration."

He concludes: "As a client, I have particularly appreciated their continuous will to be client-oriented and to defend our interests – and for my other projects, such as the installation and configuration of PeopleSoft, I once again called in Valthicha!"