The city of Reykjavik is facing the challenge of integrating a heterogeneous landscape of systems into a coherent city website based on design thinking and best practice UX.. This landscape contains simple services like applying for a dog permission or allowance to make changes to your house. But also complex services like admissions of children to school, or applying for an social apartment need to be integrated.
The city of Reykjavik has started it‘s journey of transforming it‘s service into being fully digital by forming a digital transformation team and digital strategy.One od the challenges is integrating a heterogeneous landscape of systems into a coherent city website base don design thinking and best practise of UX. This landscape contains simple services like applying for a dog permission or allowance to make changes to your house. But also complex services like admissions of children to school, or applying for an social apartment need to be integrated.
Some of the systems are based on web-forms or even printable documents. Other systems have sophisticated web APIs. Some of the systems even have dependencies between each other. For example would the change of school need to be propagated to a number of other services like after school activity registration, daycare, and school meal application.
In order to integrate these systems and allow for distributed and scalabe development the city of Reykjavik is currently building a citizen portal with Drupal 8 using a microservices architecture. The portal serves as a unified presentation layer for 100+ services that are integrated with a simple but powerful API. Currently several web services are being integrated. Hereby the integration is done by different companies, that can work independently, which greatly scales the speed of development.
The system is fully GDPR compliant and has a powerful presentation system. Through the API complex forms with dependend fields, multi-step forms, advanced form validation, and prefilling of citizen data can easily be created.
Besides creating the citizen portal we have also created an applications system, that integrates with the portal. With this system the employees of the city of Reykjavik can quickly digitalize a large number of citizen processes.
In this session we will showcase the portal as well as different applications and how they are integrated. We will also provide insights into the services processes at the city of Reykjavik and how these are represented in our solution.
The main takeaway will be under which circumstances a microservice architecture should be used and what the main implications for development and operations are.
