From ambition to a decided path

The municipality wanted to build its own capabilities around data and AI, not merely use general-purpose tools. Between the ambition and reality lay questions nobody owned. Information ownership was formally assigned but unclear in practice, the requirement for benefit assessment lacked both method and template, and the organisational structure looked different in the finance system, the HR system and the directory services.

The integration landscape was fragmented, with point-to-point solutions and manual file transfer. Without an in-house systems development organisation, access to the underlying data also became a question of contracts and requirements rather than of technology.

Eight in-depth interviews through the whole chain of command, from the chief executive to the IT architect and business developers, formed the basis of the analysis. What carried most weight were the patterns that recurred independently: what only one person said became an observation, what five described from their separate vantage points became a conclusion.

When information ownership turned out to be the recurring knot, the question was put sharply. Is an information strategy missing, or is the existing one not being followed? The difference determines which recommendation is right, and it was presented as a hypothesis to validate rather than as settled fact.

Every claim could be traced to a named source, and where evidence was missing the gap was written out plainly. Vision and strategy were then developed in workshops with the client's own project group, so that the result was already agreed by the time it reached the leadership.