Press Releases

September 30, 2009

Spain

EBD helps public administrations with their commitment to the citizenry, improving strategic and management planning processes

Sant Boi de LLobregat City Council uses EBD technology to modernize the administration within its Local Action Plan and to promote citizen participation

City Councils are the meeting point between the city government and citizenry. It was therefore of vital importance to have an action plan equipped with tools that would facilitate two-way communication between the local government and the public, and the management of all planned activities. Sant Boi de Llobregat City Council, Barcelona, developed for this term of office a Local Action Plan relying on EBD’s technology implemented by its partner Cicle in order to improve strategic and management planning processes and achieving greater citizen participation.

The Local Action Plan (LAP) is the strategic planning tool which administrations rely on for city management and prioritization of different local budgets during the term of office. Specifically, the LAP of Sant Boi de Llobregat started with several main objectives, including modernization of the administration, and to enable it to achieve an optimum management of the municipality.

"Until then, our two main structures (organic and political management) worked separately, implying an administration by sectors, coordination difficulties, dispersal of resources and efforts, as well as scarce information on governance actions, difficulties in correcting or redesigning strategies and a very poor interaction with the public" explains Llorenç Fernández, Head of the Planning and Evaluation Assistance Unit at Sant Boi de Llobregat City Council "Therefore we believed that among our main objectives was displaying the development of LAP with absolute transparency internally, to our employees, and externally to the public, besides integrating in the same space different tools capable of helping politicians during decision making." adds Fernandez.

Great demand for services by citizens, necessity of day to day coordination of LAP objectives and performances, and the necessity of creating for politicians a big picture understanding of political actions, made even more obvious the need of creating a Budget Planning and Management system (BPM) that would fulfill those requirements. Specifically, implementing an interactive computer application developed with EBD technology (leading software in production, management, integration and publication of information for the Internet, Intranet and the Extranet) that would enable unification of strategic planning with budget management, giving support during the planning stage, offering strategic lines and visible operative actions and simplifying budget elaboration tasks of public entities.

"With our software, Sant Boi City Council has been able to generate a user friendly and intuitive interactive platform, with which politicians in charge may carry out great number of simulations attending to different factors, and therefore, enabling defining and approving, for example, budgets." points out Raul Martín, EBD Chairman and founder.

This platform has different levels of users depending on their tasks and is adaptable to any strategic planning tool. It also allows generating different work scenarios or hypothesis, of great help during political decision making, by showing analysis of economic, geographic, thematic data etc, generating transfer files of all this data to the considered scenarios and allowing different graphical outputs and reports.

"It is a management project of great innovation in a public administration that also allows citizens to have an opinion about the evolution of the election manifesto of their municipality, and allowing them to receive answers to all launched questions in the most quick and efficient manner". Ángel Frechoso, Cicle Manager. Cicle is a company specialized in computer development and consulting. Cicle is also an EBD Solution Partner as provider of vertical solutions for specific markets based on their technology.

Thanks to this tool, interaction between politicians, citizens and local technicians is facilitated, providing transparency in any local actuation and fostering participation through different channels: "EBD technology allows us to have a better control over strategic planning and management processes. But what really is important to us is that with this tool we achieve greater communication with citizens, this way we provide a much better service" concludes Llorenç Fernandez.

EBD’s trajectory, providing since 1997 support to its clients and partners in the development of web environment solutions that enable them to manage all the information in the organization in an agile, simple and dynamic manner, relies on an important number of projects for different public administrations such as Barcelona City Council, Government of Catalunya and the Department of the Interior of the Spanish Government.

About Cicle
Company dedicated to computer development and consulting, formed by professionals with wide experience in designing, creation and implementation of computer systems, proceeding from important consultants from the computer sector. Certified partners of Progress Software and EBD, we also work with Visual Basic ©, .Net ©, HTML, PHP, Crystal Reports © and Actuate ©.