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"My
philosophy towards life and work is to balance chaos and structure.
Both are essential to successfully create and implement ideas
and concepts. When I'm moving towards chaos, I make an effort
to get structured and vice versa. metalayer, with the XML
philosophy of semi structured information, is a great tool
to establish an equilibrium between structure and creative
chaos."
Tony
Vinzens - Schulamt St.Gallen.
See
the Presentation at Orbit Comdex - 2002
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THE
CLIENT
Schulamt St.Gallen is a Public Authority of the city
of St.Gallen, Switzerland. It manages all public schools
(primary, secondary and middle), kindergartens, a music
school, as well as the school health service in the
city of St.Gallen.
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CHALLENGE
Schulamt
St.Gallen (School Authority) was looking for new and
innovative ways to improve and share the information
among schoolmasters and administrators. The objective
was to support the discussions, communication, decision
process, and to improve the efficiency of the city's
education system. The main challenge was to lead the
schools in a transparent way, provide structured services
and central information. There was also a need to create
new knowledge to keep-up with the dynamics of change
and development in schools.
The organization of the department is flat structured
and the leadership mostly depends on the information
and directives. The authorities were looking for ways
to bring together distributed organizations with an
enhanced and more flexible way to communicate and work
in collaboration - A platform to work together at any
time, to continue discussions started in meetings and
to generate and work on new ideas. The authorities decided
to provide a solution that would enable them to conduct
online discussions and talk about guidelines and regulations.
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PROPOSITION
& IMPLEMENTATION
metalayer proposed "samsg.ch"
- a Comty Hub solution, allowing the officials to log
in, discuss and collaborate on projects. The Comty Hub
enables members to have virtual meetings and talk synchronously.
It provides extended security access at all content
levels. Various communities on the hub can deal with
different issues separately.
After
the set up, the hub is evolving through different phases:
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In
the first phase, samsg.ch
was implemented as a platform for leading the organization
through directives. The documents were published and
discussed on the hub.
Today, in the second phase, the hub is being extensively
used by the first level of organization, which is about
half of the entire department. Presently all directives
are developed and discussed on the comty hub and are
available to the members. Samsg.ch
has quickly and significantly improved the sharing of
information among the members. Furthermore, the relationships
between the individual members in the organization have
improved as a result of faster and closer communication.
More members and levels of the organization are being
integrated into samsg.ch. Further development phases
are planned, which will involve parents and students
also.
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"We
looked for different tools which could provide us the
solution to lead and manage our networked organization.
But only the metalayer comty hub provided us the possibility
to achieve our vision".
Tony
Vinzens - Schulamt St. Gallen.
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RESULTS:
Currently
there are 23 schools involved in the project. The authorities
and school masters are able to discuss and share information
in a much faster manner than ever before. They are also able
to store all relevant information on samsg.ch, which helps
the members to access this information from anywhere at anytime.
Since there is an increased communication between the authorities
and the schoolmasters, less time is spent in travelling and
meetings.
FUTURE:
The
school department is looking forward to move ahead, and involve
the second level in the networked organization. Further on
samsg.ch will be used to directly collaborate with various
schools, teachers, students, families and other city departments.
Web-forms will be used for collecting information and maintaining
it in a structured format. Eventually all levels of the School
System in the city of St.Gallen will be networked together
for developing an efficient, transparent and open school system.
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