Since 2014 Dienst Dommelvallei has been the cooperation partner of, for, and by the municipalities Geldrop-Mierlo, Nuenen, and Son en Breugel, in the south of the Netherlands. Dienst Dommelvallei has a broad range of tasks, from finance and control to social affairs, from P&O to information delivery.
In 2019, Dienst Dommelvallei was introduced to USM. After careful preparation (and delayed by corona), with the help of a USM coach, a plan was made for the improvement of the organization and routines of the information services sector, with a focus on information security and the management of case systems, among other things. The other sectors will be addressed at a later stage.
Management has embraced USM and support for the USM approach has grown within the teams. The improvement plan for the information delivery will be deployed in 2021.
Dienst Dommelvallei is not the only municipality that is pinning its hopes on USM when striving to get in control of the complex set of tasks a municipality faces. Some municipality services, like Dienst Dommelvallei, start with the IT team, others start with a core business section, e.g. when they have largely outsourced IT. In all cases, it is the simplicity and the universal character of USM that attracts attention: a sustainable improvement of routines can be deployed with internal staff, often with light coaching by a USM coach. In doing so, municipalities are investing in their own skills and in their own future.