BlueDolphin will last longer than my career

"Therefore, we did it differently this time. We entered a basic set of data in BlueDolphin. That basic set is about 70% up to date. Now we’ve reached the stage where we’re ready to show people how they can benefit from using it in the hope that they’ll see how much easier it is and will want to keep doing it. From the first moment on we created insights and dashboards for our management and colleagues, clearly showing the added value of BlueDolphin. We’re cultivating engagement, as it were, so that more people in the organization will be motivated to keep the information up to date. This pragmatic approach ensures that people don’t see it as keeping records but as working on something that benefits them.

"One of Chantal’s goals is to make sure that BlueDolphin lasts longer than her and my careers at ANWB. In other words, that it becomes so important for our people and contributes so much to the architecture that we can’t live without it. There are now 100 BlueDolphin users, which is quite a large number.

"We currently have 880 applications in BlueDolphin. Nobody in the organization knows what all the applications do and where they’re used; that’s just not possible. We’ve purchased some of these applications five times without people knowing it. But now we’re making everything more transparent. Our aim is to make our application landscape simpler and more flexible over the next 10 years. We also want to have everything in the Cloud by 2025. But you need a clear insight to do this and configure it properly."

Centralizing means saving

ANWB is a broadly oriented organization, with a wide variety of departments with different interests. It’s actually made up of seven different subsidiaries under one name. To prevent each company from doing its own thing, we’re now going to work with architecture in the same way at each company and record the same information and link it together. In the past, the subsidiaries were silos – individual entities and independently operating clubs inside one organization. Over the past ten years, we’ve been working to make things much more overarching regarding generic IT. The reason we want to centralize is simply to save costs.

To take an example from the past (the late 1980s), in the signposting department. We had our own network, with our own servers and our own network controllers and things like that. The other departments also had their own network. As a result, two networks functioned side by side, each with its own cabling and so on. That, of course, cost piles of money. In the end, we all switched to the same network. The same applies to what we’re doing now with generic IT. We all need to use the same software, hardware, applications, and processes.

Standardization delivers huge savings. It also makes you less diverse in what you have to offer the customer, but at the same time, it makes you more resilient and flexible, making it much easier and faster to anticipate changes. If you formalize 80% of your work, you have 20% time to spare and to allow your own ideas and creativity to flourish. This keeps your work fun. You automate that 80% routine, so that it runs as efficiently as possible, leaving you with enough space to be creative. What I’m actually saying is that the more you standardize and then automate, the more time you have left to keep your work creative and fun.