Data protection and information security consulting for municipalities

About GKDS

GKDS, short for Gesellschaft für kommunalen Datenschutz mbH (transl. Association for municipal data protection) was founded as a daughter of AKDB, short for Anstalt für kommunale Datenverarbeitung in Bayern (transl. Institution for municipal data processing in Bavaria), in 2018. As a consultancy, GKDS provides services concerning data protection and information security, such as the implementation of the GDPR and support in creating information security concepts or the provision of external data protection and information security officers.

Stackfield as an insider tip during the founding days of GKDS

Regina Reitenhardt, Managing Director of GKDS, came across Stackfield in 2018, shortly after founding the consultancy, following a recommendation from one of GKDS' co-partners. This shareholder advised her to use Stackfield for client collaboration and to put client management on a solid, structured footing. As Regina Reitenhardt immediately grew fond of Stackfield's user interface and Stackfield promised high data protection standards, she decided to give the tool a chance.

Processing personal data in compliance with the GDPR

In the European Union, the handling of personal data is strictly regulated by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As a consulting firm, GKDS works with customer data daily and aimed to process such data in Stackfield, making the company reliant on Stackfield's GDPR compliance. However, Stackfield exceeded all expectations. In addition to the requirements of the GDPR, such as data processing on EU servers, Stackfield impressed with ISO 27001-certified data centers, real end-to-end encryption, and optional security features such as two-factor authentication. Regina Reitenhardt confirms: Especially as a company specializing in data protection, we cannot and do not want anything else.

Customer management as a stepping stone

Once the decision to use Stackfield had been made, Regina Reitenhardt decided to get started with customer collaboration in Stackfield and thus, familiarize themselves with Stackfield's functionality and user interface in practice.

For the collaboration with the municipalities, each customer was initially given their own workspace, a so-called room in Stackfield. As the data protection requirements remain the same for each customer, a blueprint was added. In a separate room, the requirements were to be stored here as tasks, filled with all relevant information, and later copied to the customer rooms. Stackfield's task cards offered several ways to store and structure information for customers in a user-defined way. Details can be collected in the description, documents are attached to the task and particularly helpful: the individual work steps are listed in checklists with subtasks and can thus be processed and ticked off step-by-step by the customer.

Transparent collaboration in Stackfield: customers as guests in workspaces

Stackfield's biggest advantage for customer collaboration: the customer is part of the workspace and can collaborate and communicate centrally with consulting units. To restrict the customers' user rights in GKDS' Stackfield organization, they are added to the organization and the corresponding room with the role Guest.

The guest role grants the customer all relevant functionalities within the rooms as well as relevant communication channels. All other non-relevant functions of the organization, such as the archive, the cross-room reports, or the organization's settings, are denied to guests.

This allows the GKDS team to clearly differentiate between internal and external users and restrict rights in the Stackfield organization accordingly.

Transparent processing of work packages and documentation for the future

As GKDS and its customers make particularly intensive use of the chat functionality in the room, a large part of the communication is visible to all room members. Communicated information remains documented for the future and can be tracked at any time. Once collaboration with a customer is complete, the corresponding room is archived and disappears from the overview of active customer rooms in the sidebar. The archive offers the advantage of keeping the rooms accessible in the background. Whenever required, the archive can be called up via the global search and searched for specific rooms. Martina Moser, Deputy Manager at GKDS, explains: We can prove at any time when we have worked with the customer. The customers and we are very satisfied with this.

Plans for the future: internal administration in Stackfield

In the future, internal administration processes will also be gradually added and become part of the work in Stackfield. For instance, various marketing processes are currently in the pilot phase and the consultancy's CRM is also set to take place in Stackfield in compliance with data protection regulations soon. Regina Reitenhardt is confident that Stackfield will soon be part of everyday life in all areas of GKDS.