Following a multi-day outage, Mayor Hanno Benz is reorganizing IT responsibilities
Following a multi-day outage of the city's email system, the science city of Darmstadt is once again accessible via its usual digital channels. As the city announced, the "GroupWise" system has been running largely stable since Thursday midday. Mayor Hanno Benz announced organizational changes and an accelerated modernization of the city's IT infrastructure following the disruption.
The city administration's email system had been down since Monday (June 29). Various offices and departments were affected. According to Mayor Benz, the disruption exposed fundamental problems with the existing IT infrastructure.
"The failure has made clear what has been known for some time: things cannot and will not continue under the current conditions," Benz emphasizes.
GroupWise is an outdated email system that is hardly used in the private sector or by other municipalities anymore. Furthermore, it lacks a sustainable long-term deletion and archiving concept. As a result, storage capacity has had to be repeatedly expanded – a process that is complex and prone to failure within the existing system structure.
However, according to the mayor, the challenge extends beyond individual email programs. The entire city IT infrastructure has become too complex over the years.
“The overall system of the city’s IT has simply become too complex to continue operating reliably in its current form,” explains Benz.
Task force to drive modernization forward
As a consequence of the outage, the mayor has reorganized responsibilities. By organizational decree, both the email system and the Microsoft 365 implementation project have been assigned to the mayor's office.
Furthermore, a task force was established. Its members include the mayor, the head of public order, the heads of the offices for information technology, internal services and communication, as well as the managing director of Digitalstadt GmbH.
The goal is to implement the introduction of Microsoft 365 and the replacement of the existing "GroupWise" system in the future via a service provider located near the city.
“This allows us to pool expertise where it can be provided professionally and reliably,” explains Benz.
The city intends to push ahead with the modernization of its IT infrastructure with greater vigor. "We are thus drawing the necessary conclusions, reorganizing responsibilities, and modernizing the city's IT with the required urgency," said the mayor.
(DARMSTADT – RED/PSD/ho)
