Software for municipalities: what digitisation really needs

Paper is not the problem

Discussions of municipal digitisation often focus on paper. Parents fill in forms, the office copies them into spreadsheets, someone bills manually each month, and cancelling a child’s meal takes a phone call. That was school meal administration in many places before we built Schulmittag.

But paper is only the symptom. The real problem is the chain: four parties, four breaks between media, nobody sees the whole. Digitisation does not mean replacing a form with a PDF. It means replacing the chain with a system that brings registration, overview and billing together.

What a municipality really needs

Working with the municipality of Gallneukirchen, Petrinum Linz and Sportmittelschule Tulln taught me four requirements that rarely appear in tenders yet determine their success:

• Their own instance, their own data. A municipality does not want to be tenant number 47 in someone else’s cloud. Schulmittag gives each institution an isolated instance and database on European servers, clearly separable and erasable.
• A contact who builds. When something breaks, an office does not want a ticket number. It wants the person who wrote the system. We mean this literally: who builds, answers.
• A price that can be approved. An annual fee per institution, including operation and updates. A municipal council can budget that. Hidden costs cannot be budgeted.
• An exit that remains possible. A contract retained only because leaving hurts is not a good contract. Ours can be terminated annually, requiring us to do good work every year.

The uncomfortable truth about operations

Software introduced then abandoned becomes a security risk in two years and a renovation project in five. Operations — updates, security, availability — are not an appendix; they are the project. That is why we operate what we build and charge for operations, including for non-profits.

We support instance deployment with fleetdeck, our openly available deployment tool. It makes recurring steps traceable and repeatable. Configuration, practical rollout and support must still be agreed for each institution.

Starting small is not a shortcoming

The most common mistake is a huge platform that does everything and never gets finished. A better route is one bounded problem solved completely: first school meals, which create work every month, then the next task. A direct award for a clearly defined deliverable is approved, delivered and assessed faster than a broad framework project.

Digitisation that holds up looks ordinary: an office no longer retyping data at month-end. At first, that is enough.