Company
ScriptRunner customer from the very beginning
The City of Munich, the capital of the state of Bavaria, is one of the largest municipal employers in Germany. Education and sports, district administration, social services, and others – the various areas of responsibility are organized in 15 departments. Together with six in-house municipal enterprises, the state capital employs over 40,000 people. The IT department consists of more than 1,100 IT specialists and is all about digitalization. The department is responsible for digital infrastructure and digital participation.
Starting point
Decision to roll out Microsoft Windows and M365
The IT landscape was due for a change. The plenary session of the Munich City Council decided in late 2017 to switch to uniform, standardized IT workstations based on Microsoft Windows and M365 until the end of 2022. In line with this decision, products with an industry-standard status were to be used in the future for all standard functionalities (word processing, spreadsheets, internet browsers, etc.). For system administration and configuration, as well as for automation, the scripting language PowerShell was the obvious choice in the Microsoft environment.
PowerShell is gaining in importance
When it came to scripting, administrators and IT professionals were initially left on their own. In addition to writing the scripts, it was necessary to create graphical user interfaces (GUIs) so that colleagues without PowerShell knowledge could also execute a script. However, the people executing the scripts still needed full rights to the system, and context separation (administrator vs. user) was impossible. A recommendation finally led to a closer look at ScriptRunner. Martin Schmidt, Team Leader Development and Infrastructure – Remote Desktop Services, recalls: "The product sounded promising and precisely made to consolidate scripts and avoid redundant work. We wanted to bring structure into our processes and create a script repository." In addition, the idea was to establish a uniform look & feel through the automatically generated GUI, and to save time that could be used for scripting, for example.
Challenge
High workload, low level of automation
In Munich, many companies compete for IT specialists, and vacant positions mean increased workloads of others. Repetitive, sometimes boring tasks and assembly-line processing do not attract any new colleagues to the department. But how can the attractiveness of the tasks and the satisfaction of the employees be increased? Anyone who uses PowerShell knows the feeling: Smart scripts are fun to create, improve quality, and thanks to the increased efficiency, ensure that there is enough time for other things, such as tasks that are perceived as meaningful. In short, it pays to find bottlenecks and to automate processes.
"We're writing a script for that!"
For years, the City of Munich (Landeshauptstadt München, LHM) has relied on Computacenter, one of the leading vendor-independent technology partners. Computacenter consultants are experienced in finding and leveraging the potential for automation. As the company is a ScriptRunner Business Partner, they can advise on the expansion of the solution, accompany the implementation, and know, for example, which interfaces can be connected via which type of connectors. The consultants' favorite question is: "How can we automate this task, increase quality and save time? We will write a script for that!" How well does support and communication work, how are responsibilities regulated in such a three-party constellation? Martin Schmidt sums up the experience: "The contacts are always available; the information chain is short, and the exchange is very good. The cooperation with Computacenter and ScriptRunner is and always has been solution-oriented and fast."
