About V-ICT-OR
V-ICT-OR (Flemish ICT Organization) is a non-profit organization that supports Flemish local governments in the digitization process. The association works with an internal team that builds on the expertise of various experts in the field to come up with solutions to various problems that local IT teams are struggling with.
Our five central goals:
- We aim to develop and promote expertise in the field of ICT in order to support the professionalization of ICT professionals and managers at every level in local government.
- We aim to organize services and advocacy in the broad sense for all those professionally involved in ICT policy at the local government level. The main focus is on increasing the social importance of ICT, the commitment to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness.
- We aim to provide a network and meeting/exchanging forum between all of those who are active in the field of ICT at the local government level.
- We want to provide a platform to bring ICT managers at the local government level together. In this way, we want to lower the threshold for mutual cooperation and synergy significantly. Nevertheless, we also wish to act as a driving force to support cooperation between the various other levels of government. From a customer-oriented point of view it is essential that the various levels of government, and therefore also their ICT managers, join forces and take joint initiatives regarding ICT developments of the government, or at least cooperate intensively with ICT developments originating from other administrative levels.
- Finally, we also want to function as an external sounding board, to raise the strategic importance of ICT for the local government level with policy makers, and to work towards a change in mentality and culture of open and proper governance through appropriate and sufficient ICT investments in people and resources.
Our vision.
The Flemish ICT Organisation has invested heavily in a project-based elaboration of certain themes that play a significant role at the local government level. Our knowledge centre laid out a decent foundation of partnership and sources from which we can move forward. The composite vision towards the near future therefore mainly focuses on the following elements:
- the development of a civil service steering committee that creates a collective vision (not just ICT managers) of how automatization projects and information systems should be developed at the local government level
- the development of a competence centre with a maximum number of people from the free market around the table
- raising awareness and unambiguously translating the standard for information security to municipalities, unambiguity in the same standard regarding the cooperation between CPAS and municipality
- the possibilities of standardizing a municipal data model (data warehouse) that is maximally fed and linked to authentic data sources
- support the academically accepted mid-office concept and urge market players to include it in their concrete implementations
We wish to implement this vision to the maximum extent in cooperation with our fellow professional federations and the Flemish government.
In order to get a better insight into what is going on in other countries in the field of digitisation in local authorities, V-ICT-OR has joined the international cooperation LOLA (= Linked Organisation of Local Authorities), of which our chairman Eddy Van der Stock is also chairman.
From the first contacts with the associations from other European countries, it appears that there are quite a few similarities in the topics that are discussed. For instance, we find the remuneration of the ICT employee, but also the appreciation of the ICT service and service provision, or the discussion about the position of the ICT employee and the ICT service within the board, ...
The first European projects have already taken place. Since 2012, LOLA is a NPO, so we can present ourselves under one flag on a European and global level.
LOLA gives us the opportunity to cooperate with the following partners:
- ALGIM - New-Zeeland
- GMIS - USA
- KommITS - Sweden
- MISA - Canada
- SOCITM - The United Kingdom
- Nedictor - The Netherlands
- MAV Technology - Australia
What is LOLA?
LOLA (Linked Organisation of Local Authority ICT Societies “LOLA”) is a non-profit organisation of ICT professional associations. These associations comprise professionals who work in local authority and other local public service delivery organisations, and their suppliers, in different countries worldwide.
LOLA will work collectively and collaboratively to achieve benefits to these organisations, their members and the citizens they serve.
Our core values are based on our desire to provide a high standard of local authority services to our citizens through the effective deployment of Information and Communications Technologies. We intend to achieve this through joint projects, sharing of good practice, products and services, joint influencing of national governments, and engaging the ICT supply industry.
We aim to make a significant contribution to the development of European and/or international ICT standards, codes of good practice, cross national projects coordination and potentially drawing on National and European funding to achieve these objectives. Similar opportunities outside Europe will also be exploited.
We provide mutual support to one another in the pursuit of our objectives.
We support the declarations specified in the Citadel Statement (as an extension of the Malmo declaration) as specific work domains or core areas where national decision makers with our support can provide tangible support to improve Local Government:
- Common Architecture, Shared Services and Standards;
- Open Data, Transparency and Personal Rights:
- Citizen Participation and Involvement:
- Privacy and Identification of Individuals
- Rural Inclusion