2023 marked a turning point for the City of Brussels, which saw all its departments move to BRUCITY. The entire administration is now centralised in a single location. i-CITY has also moved to this building, Brucity, the new administrative centre of the City of Brussels. Now that we are working alongside the City teams, we have a unique opportunity to better understand its needs and ensure a superior quality of service. Our mission remains to guide the City in its transformation into a citizen-centric Smart City.
This move to Brucity is the culmination of several years' work, punctuated by key milestones that we would like to highlight:
- Setting up the Digital Factory: a space dedicated to the digitalisation of products and services for citizens and employees. The digitisation of services has made them accessible online, 24/7, which was a prerequisite for the move to avoid service congestion.
- Adoption of the New Way of Working: modernisation of working methods in all City departments, another prerequisite for the introduction of structural teleworking.
- Creation of a secure, high-performance network: enable all City of Brussels employees to work efficiently from Brucity, from one of the 320 other sites or from home, and to communicate with each other.
- Dematerialisation of documents: reduction of 150 tonnes of paper, or 7.6 km of documents, enabling the City of Brussels to become paperless.
- Launch of the BRUCE portal: available 24/7, this portal manages 300,000 files a year, facilitating the centralised management of interactions and files, contextualised access to City services via MyBXL, appointment scheduling, queue management, management of inbound and outbound communication, electronic payments and workload distribution between employees.
In addition, i-CITY has carried out major projects for Public Education, modernising and securing the networks of nine sites, and migrated the libraries of 14 Brussels municipalities to a new management software package.
Non-profit organisations (ASBL) were also at the heart of our activities, with the integration of ASBL Brussels Major Events (BME), the production launch of the last two modules of the LIOS application for ASBL Bravvo, and the IT transformation of Les Cuisines Bruxelloises (LCB) through a major network migration and the modernisation of their PC fleet.
Throughout these projects, we were committed to providing a quality service while maintaining a high level of safety.
We are proud to have received several awards this year, underlining our ability to lead a major digital organisational change, improve the citizen/administration relationship and increase overall performance:
- CIO Project of the Year
- Agoria nomination
- Smart City nomination
- CDO of the Year 2023
- ICT Project of the Year
These prestigious awards underline the hard work and commitment of our teams and encourage us to continue our efforts to develop innovative, smart solutions.
"2023 saw many projects and innovations for i-CITY Brussels. Our teams have risen to many challenges and achieved significant results while providing a quality service and guaranteeing data and system security. We are committed to continuing our efforts to support the City of Brussels in its digital transition and offer citizens ever more efficient and accessible services."
2023 was also a pivotal year in which we prepared the next IT stage for the City of Brussels and the PCSW. In this context, we have:
- Reviewed the master plan: to reassess its relevance to the growing ambitions of the City and its eco-system, and in light of technological innovations. The consulting firm Gartner was commissioned to carry out this project, producing a report based on interviews with some of the General Managers of the City and PCSW, the Municipal Secretary and the Alderman for IT.
- Reaffirmed i-CITY's mission: we have defined six strategic pillars: Operational Excellence, People, Cyber Security, Innovation, Data & AI, Administrative Simplification and Digitisation, reinforcing our vision: "Brussels, Digital and Citizen Friendly".
All in all, 2023 was a year of ambitious projects and important innovations for i-CITY Brussels. Our teams have risen to many challenges while guaranteeing the safety and quality of our services. We remain resolutely committed to supporting the City in its digital transition and offering citizens ever more efficient and accessible services.