DIG-IT (Digitalisierung und Informatik) is the IT unit within the Department of Education of the Canton Basel-Stadt. It is a leading force in providing secure, modern and efficient IT services for the region’s public schools and administration. Its services cover two key areas: the pedagogical sector (schools, students and teachers) and the administrative sector.
DIG-IT provides services to over 29,000 students, 4,300 teachers and 2,000 staff members across more than 230 educational sites and 120 administrative locations. With a team of 70 employees, DIG-IT acts as the backbone of Basel’s digital education landscape, serving as a reliable partner for technological development, innovation and the optimization of business processes.
Since 2010, Adfinis has been a key partner to DIG-IT. What began as a classic support agreement has grown into a deep, strategic collaboration built on trust, responsiveness, and shared ambition.
Adfinis is not just a service provider; we are an embedded extension of the DIG-IT team, contributing across the full IT lifecycle. We help DIG-IT translate its operational and process requirements into scalable IT solutions, from designing new onboarding processes to integrating secure identity systems.
This partnership is defined by its flexibility and continuity:
As DIG-IT's environment evolves, Adfinis remains a stable and proactive partner. Together, we identify emerging needs and deliver value in a way that feels effortless and reliable to the schools and staff we support.
Adfinis has been our strategic partner for open source solutions for many years. They support us in both the operation and the further development and innovation of our digital services for the education sector. Thanks to a shared understanding of customer and market needs, we work together to develop customized solutions that effectively combine open source and closed source systems, enabling us to remain innovative and agile.
Christian Kern | Head of Digitalization and Projects
Over the course of our 15-year collaboration, Adfinis and DIG-IT have continuously evolved Basel-Stadt's educational IT infrastructure. As technology, user needs and security requirements grew more complex, so did the demands on DIG-IT’s systems. Our long-term partnership enabled us to identify and proactively address these emerging challenges together.
Together, we continuously look for ways to optimise DIG-IT’s operations. For example, when new hypervisors and backup solutions were introduced, Adfinis offered a time-saving solution to improve the provisioning of test environments. With a growing number of services in production, the manual approach was no longer sustainable; each test system took up to six hours to create, leading to long turnaround times and discrepancies that introduced risk.
Under the framework of our Managed Services agreement, we addressed this challenge as part of our ongoing commitment to modernisation. We automated the provisioning process, leveraging our deep expertise to reduce engineering time from six hours to just one and cut the overall deployment process from a full day to only 2.5 hours.
My experience working with Adfinis has been one of mutual respect and appreciation. Their staff are highly skilled and are able to help us make progress in the right areas with their expertise. In the IT industry, I consider Adfinis to be among the top third of providers, particularly because of their customer focus and their openness to different solutions.
Thomas Wenk | Head of DIG-IT
This success was not an isolated project, but a natural outcome of our long-standing partnership. The same shared context and proactive approach that made this automation possible also drove a wide range of other key initiatives, including:
These outcomes were made possible by an ongoing, proactive collaboration where Adfinis handles the full lifecycle, from 24/7 incident response to requirement engineering and coordination with third-party vendors.