The French regional authorities are currently experiencing a profound transformation of their role, which is leading them to update their skills and competencies. In the light of this major challenge, and of the vital role played by information systems in making it happen, the Regional Council in Languedoc Roussillon is getting heavily involved in using new technologies, and has chosen Bull to support it in the process of rationalizing, securing and operating its IT infrastructures, as well as in the development and updating of main applications.
The Languedoc Roussillon Regional Council is relying on an ambitious IT masterplan to build a reliable information system that delivers significant added value. The system will not only have to meet business needs, but also reflect the global action strategy set out in the ‘Regional Pact’: equality of opportunity, economic development and sustainable development for the Region. With this in mind, the Regional Council is favoring the use of Open Source technologies to guarantee reliability, interoperability, durability and cost control at the level of its infrastructure, applications and workstations.
“Much more than just a random collection of tools, the information system is a coherent and consistent set of resources and applications that will enable us to process, organize and search through the mass of information we have available,” commented Thierry Camuzat, Deputy Managing Director responsible for Services and Resource Optimization. “Thanks to the new system, our administrative capabilities will be greatly improved, actions will be better controlled and evaluated, budgets will be managed more effectively, and elected representatives as well as citizens will be better informed.”
Whether they are designed to support the local population directly or to contribute to the development of innovative business practices within the regional authority, the projects that Bull is carrying out will all contribute significantly to meeting the Region’s objectives:
@gile, an innovative portal: Bull has designed, developed and is responsible for the continued evolution of ‘@gile’, a portal that provides a single interface between high-schools and the Regional Council. Based on an open architecture, it structures and automates all the tasks relating to the management of equipment requests, free distribution of 650,000 textbooks (a project that is specific to this Region), the financing of educational projects and the collecting of information.
SIGEP, for optimum business management of the Region: Bull was responsible for leading and delivering the SIGEP project: a Business Intelligence system designed to evaluate public services actions and to respond to the needs expressed by the various functions within the Council. SIGEP provides around 300 dashboards to over 200 civil servants, covering areas such as finance, education and training. The users find the resulting time savings and better information sharing vitally important.
IT infrastructure virtualization: Bull led the project to rationalize the councils’ IT infrastructures, migrating the existing infrastructure – which consisted of 40 heterogeneous servers – to a virtualized Blade center-type infrastructure.
Outsourcing: Bull is responsible for operating the IT infrastructures on the customer’s site, carrying out third-party application maintenance and updating the regional authority’s business applications. This €5 million contract was renewed in March 2009 for a four-year period.
“Through the services delivered to the Regional Council of Languedoc Roussillon, Bull is clearly demonstrating its ability to provide comprehensive support to local and regional authorities undertaking transformation projects, by helping them to take full advantage of new technologies in order to update their IT infrastructures and implement new business processes successfully,” confirmed Eric Passeron, Director of Integration & Software at Bull Services and Director of the Solutions team at Bull France.
