Langedijk is a municipality in the province of North Holland, ten kilometres northeast of Alkmaar. With over 27,000 inhabitants it is a medium-sized municipality. In 2014, the municipality decided to outsource the Work and Income processes to the Intermunicipal Social Services Stop Work. This decision was the starting signal to digitise the work and income files of the municipality of Langedijk.
Working together
The Inter-municipal Social Service (ISD) Stop Work is a joint venture between the municipalities of Heerhugowaard, Alkmaar and Langedijk that started on 1 January 2015 in order to jointly tackle the implementation of the Participation Act. On 1 July 2014, the Participation Act was adopted as a replacement for the Work and Assistance Act (Wwb), the Social Employment Act (WSW) and a large part of the Work and Employment Support for Young Disabled Persons Act (Wajong). The ISD Workplace Station will take over the implementation of this law, so that forces can be combined and efficiency benefits can be achieved. As a result of the cooperation between the municipalities and the ISD Work Stop, the municipality of Langedijk came into contact with Archive-IT. The municipality of Alkmaar already had experience with Archive-IT, thanks to previous projects with which they are satisfied. The choice for Archive-IT was made after a thorough investigation, in which they weighed different criteria. An important criterion was the ISO 27001 certificate, which stands for information security. “We work with privacy-sensitive documents and Archive-IT has that completely in order,” says Alex Huisman, Informatisering en Automatisering Advisor at the municipality of Langedijk.
Entry into participation law
The work and income files of the municipality of Langedijk have all been delivered digitally in the Document Management System of the municipality of Alkmaar, which provides the ICT support of Halte Werk. The municipality of Langedijk has since reconstructed the physical files back in its own archive, after the digitisation had taken place. The establishment of the ISD Stop Work was therefore the starting signal to digitise these files as a matter of priority. Everything had to be digital in the short term, so that Halte WerkD could start when the Participation Act came into force.
Well thought out and step by step
Digital working is not unknown to the municipality. “We work with digital mail items”, says Huisman. “Every day, mail items are scanned by our own employees, digitally stored and added to the work stock of the right person, and a project such as scanning and opening up the Work and Income files is a natural next step for our municipality towards a new way of working digitally. We are currently working on a handbook to map out processes for digitisation. Our wish is to start the implementation after the summer, which will be drawn up by the Department of Documentary Information Provision (DIV). First of all, we will focus on digitising pieces that do not have a long retention period, with the aim of no longer having to physically store these pieces. A digital municipality, that’s what we want to be.”
“We are working hard to prepare the municipality for new legislation and regulations, such as the Environment Act, and developments such as e-ID. More efficient use of time and paper is an advantage. The basis for achieving this goal is the prior digitisation of information and not the subsequent digitisation of information. In this way, we can adapt the work process, digital work will increase and we can integrate these developments more and more effectively into our work processes.”