Digital Norway is a non-profit organization that was started in 2017 by 15 committed business actors to accelerate the digitalization of Norwegian business, with a special focus on small and medium-sized enterprises.
Among other things, they work to ensure companies and employees have access to the knowledge and networking they need in a digital world through the provision of free courses, learning trips, webinars and digital meeting spaces.
Digital Norway uses a number of systems (CRM, LSM, accounting, etc.), but has experienced challenges related to the fact that the data from these systems is difficult to access. To successfully create value and insight from this data, a time-consuming and manual job must be done. They therefore saw the need to automate and standardize data collection, so that it could be easily used in reporting and analysis.
It was also important to establish a forward-looking and scalable reporting architecture that was adaptable so that new needs could be realized on an ongoing basis and new available technologies could be adopted quickly.
One of Digital Norway's most important offerings is their course portal, where they collect and make available all their courses to users. Digital Norway has a strong focus on providing relevant content that users actually demand and that gives them value. To manage this, they wanted to get more value out of the data in the CRM system. Among other things, they needed to increase their understanding of which courses were the most popular.
With this insight, they can see correlations in the data such as users versus company, location, size and industry affiliation. This allows Digital Norway to tailor content to different user groups and industries. The insight must be able to be extracted across different data, such as that users in this type of company, in this type of industry, demand these types of courses. All based on insights from the data they're sitting on.
Digital Norway saw great benefits in how Axaz solves business and IT needs such as services.
“We found it exciting to have a player using forward-looking cloud-based technology combined with business expertise, delivering in a new way as Axaz is doing. Fast and agile deliveries, which give us a high ability to change when new needs arise without incurring huge costs, was crucial to why we chose Axaz as our partner.”, says Kristoffersen.
Step one of the process involved getting an overall description and understanding of Digital Norway's needs. Having the ability to understand the business needs and processes and how these are supported (or not supported) by technology is a crucial success criterion. This process was carried out through continuous iterations with continuous dialogue between Digital Norway and Axaz ensuring that the solution proposal matched the actual needs.
In order for Digital Norway to gain value and insight from the data they generated, making the data available for analysis was an important factor. This involved, among other things, setting up automated processes for retrieving and transferring data between relevant systems. By automating data flow, Digital Norway makes data available in an efficient way, saving a lot of resource usage by not having to do this work manually.
Technically, it involved various processes:
The first part was about retrieving data from relevant sources (CRM and learning platform) and integrating these using Boomi's integration platform. We extracted accessible and relevant data from the APIs, which allowed Digital Norway to access the data automatically.
We used the integration platform to develop integration processes and business logic. The integration platform enabled rapid integration of data from other systems and sources, and with functionality to easily devise business logic based on data automating manual processes.
Furthermore, the data was made available in a data platform, where we defined an appropriate and scalable structure on the data model based on our best practices.
Data in the data platform is used as a robust and consistent basis for analysis and visualization. Axaz developed dashboards and analytics that provided good control of KPIs and insights that were important to Digital Norway. By combining data from multiple sources, it provided Digital Norway with holistic and richer analyses, which provided a sound basis for making good, data-driven decisions going forward.
“Digital Norway is an extremely learning and curious organization, which has been a dream to work with! They are forward-thinking, always asking questions and want to be a clear leader in the digitalisation of Norway. Now that they get more value out of their data and their ability to use that data proactively in decision-making, we strongly believe they will be just that!”, says Ruben Jenssen, Delivery Manager at Axaz.
Digital Norway can continuously provide input for visualizations, analyses or other initiatives that will add new value. New needs are realized continuously through an agile delivery model, which ensures that Digital Norway can continue to develop existing and new products and services.
By using an integration platform and automatically making data available for analysis and insights, Digital Norway can realize more gains.
Some of them are:
We have built a solution design that is forward-looking in that the technology facilitates solving future needs, as well as being easy to scale. Digital Norway has realized several gains by becoming data-driven and more adaptable, but there are still countless opportunities to create even more value out of data and by continuing to develop the business.