The city is pooling its services
In 2014, the MAPTAM (Modernisation of Territorial Public Action and the Affirmation of Metropolitan Areas) law established a new status for metropolitan areas in France. It allows conurbations with over 400,000 inhabitants to be directly involved in local economic development, innovation, energy transition and urban policy.
Created the following year, Bordeaux Métropole manages local services such as waste, water, sanitation and transport. Other key responsibilities include driving major development projects in the area, such as bridges, roads and town planning, as well as other responsibilities transferred from smaller local districts or ‘communes’.
One of these responsibilities is digital services, which are now shared between 18 towns in the region. The new standardised regional information system includes 1,600 consolidated digital services that cover 850,000 residents and 20,000 public employees.
This success of this initial consolidation project is largely a result of the implementation of ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM). This includes the creation of a call centre that optimises agents’ digital activities, and now provides immediate year-round responses to users’ IT requests.
Low carbon by 2050
Buoyed by its success, Bordeaux Métropole is now looking to significantly extend its ambition of becoming energy positive and low carbon by 2050.
“We have adopted a region-wide political objective to adopt an ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) approach, and digital must play its part”, says Jean-Noël Olivier, Head of Digital & Information Systems at Bordeaux Métropole.
ESG refers to the three main factors used to assess the sustainability of investments such as IT service provision. With digital technology increasingly used to manage services and facilities, the aim is to launch an effective IT tool to assess their impact and handle issues such as the replacement of equipment and relocation of agents. Specifically, it will aim to assess a service’s usefulness, its environmental impact and other key questions.
In September 2021, Bordeaux Métropole launched the “Orientations Numériques Partagées”—Shared Digital Orientations—strategy, which details its commitment to responsible digital development. It sets out to place citizens at the heart of digital services that are useful and accessible to all and bring about an efficient digital transformation of public services that takes their environmental footprint into consideration.
“We’ve established the principle that digital should be chosen, not imposed. It’s all about striking a balance between value-added digital services and their environmental, social and ethical impact”, Jean-Noël explains. “A key aspect of our approach was to set up a system to measure our digital carbon footprint”.
Putting ESG on the agenda
Bordeaux Métropole turned to Nantes-based IT consultancy Aguaro to find out about its My IT Footprint solution—an app that enhances the ServiceNow platform by placing carbon footprint issues at the centre of the day-to-day management of digital services.
The government department is now able to anchor ESG issues in its everyday work by aligning the decision-making process more closely with its environmental ambitions. The solution has also enabled Bordeaux to raise awareness among its employees. Users receive information about the environmental footprint of the digital devices and services they use, enabling them to make more sustainable decisions.
Bordeaux Métropole’s digital department can also “colour” its IT budgets based on their environmental footprint to verify as quickly as possible that future investments are in line with the city’s climate commitments.
“One benefit for Bordeaux Métropole is that it can build on the investments already made in the ServiceNow platform by automating many of the processes associated with its services”, explains Matthieu Poulard, Co-Founder of Aguaro. “Staff have access to data with a high degree of granularity as the application is linked directly to the source data. This is essential for identifying savings opportunities and making the results more reliable”.
This optimised management of digital services at Bordeaux Métropole has been enabled by ServiceNow ITSM in combination with the smart solution to assess the carbon footprint associated with its digital activities.
“We’ve adopted a dynamic approach that has now become an integral part of our day-to-day management style”, explains Jean-Noël. “We didn’t build something separate, but integrated these features into our existing processes around digital service delivery”.
A 360-degree vision of the data
Being able to cover a full range of activities is essential when looking to limit pollution outputs, as highlighted by the latest report by Arcep. Thanks to Aguaro’s solution, Jean-Noël’s team was not only able to assess the environmental impact of all equipment used in the communes, but also track other activities that generate greenhouse gas emissions. Metrics can cover key areas such as maintenance services or distances travelled transporting equipment between sites.
Bordeaux Métropole is now able to see the results of the solution and build a reliable strategy to further reduce its environmental impact. This includes action plans whose effects can be measured and recorded over time, playing a critical role in achieving carbon-reduction targets.
“It’s important that this initial stage of the project is used as a benchmark and that we can monitor our impact and assess our carbon footprint from one year to the next”, Jean-Noël explains.
Greater awareness among users
Jean-Noël’s team has also set up a ServiceNow service portal to engage users in the principles of carbon reduction. The portal features a catalogue of services and equipment that displays their environmental impact when used or purchased. Based on these results, a problematic service may be discontinued or a key piece of equipment kept in use for longer.
Taking the initiative further still, Bordeaux Métropole now offers other digital responsibility initiatives, such as Digital Clean-up Days. Over a three-week period, staff are shown how to clean up files and optimise online storage and their email service. Staff can also return obsolete personal devices at 28 collection points throughout the region.
Other benefits enabled by ServiceNow ITSM and Aguaro’s solution include dynamic, personalised messaging that can be sent via the portal for each user. This enables them to access tools they need to understand the project’s current status, see results achieved from joint objectives and access further resources so they can build their contributions.