The future of municipal IT: how Common Ground and Haven are accelerating digital transformation

Common Ground focuses on flexible and modern information provision, in which data is decoupled from applications and processes. This approach enables efficient data exchange and enables municipalities to optimise their operations and dramatically improve their services to citizens. Because it allows municipalities to implement digital solutions faster and more efficiently, it leads to:

• Cost reduction: Reusable modules avoid double development costs.
• Better cooperation: By using standardised information models and APIs, municipalities and chain partners can access and exchange data in a standardised manner, allowing them to cooperate more efficiently.
• Privacy and security: The separation of data and application layers helps municipalities better comply with privacy legislation and ensures safer data exchange.

Previder also endorses the idea of a standard technical infrastructure setup as described with Haven. Haven provides a platform-independent cloud infrastructure that allows applications to be easily reused and migrated between different IT environments. This makes application management simpler and more cost-efficient and fits perfectly with our commitment to innovation and reliability in digital transformation. This brings benefits such as:

• Easy deployment and management: Standardisation makes adoption smooth. System administrators can manage different applications in the same way, reducing management complexity and costs.
• Flexibility: Applications can be hosted anywhere without modifications to specific infrastructure, making migrations easier.
• Open Source: Haven is fully open source, including tools and reference implementations, allowing governments and vendors to easily set up their own Haven environments.

Application Common Ground and Haven

There are two ways in which municipalities and government bodies can use Common Ground and Haven, depending on their specific situation and needs:

1. Municipalities or government bodies that develop or manage source code themselves

These organisations can choose to partner with Previder, guaranteeing that both applications and data are hosted entirely in our data centres in the Netherlands. This offers maximum control over the IT infrastructure and is in line with the growing need for data localisation and stricter privacy requirements.

2. SVs offering software as a SaaS solution

When municipalities choose not to develop software themselves, they can rely on Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who develop, maintain and offer software as a SaaS solution. For municipalities that want a “single point of contact”, this is an attractive option. However, it is crucial here to make arrangements with the ISV provider for hosting in the Netherlands, so that the data continues to meet the same high standards for security and compliance.

Both models fit seamlessly with the flexibility and innovation enabled by Common Ground and Haven, while meeting the highest standards for privacy and data security.

Previder sees powerful means in both Common Ground and Haven to support and accelerate the digital transformation of municipalities. We are therefore not the first Dutch Haven-compliant IT service provider for nothing. By committing to the principles of Common Ground and Haven, we confirm our role as a strategic IT partner for municipalities. With this approach, we contribute to a future-proof digital infrastructure in which efficiency, security and innovation are central.