Statens IT enables government clients to scale up to 70%. – Same team and full on-prem control
Statens IT (The Agency for Governmental IT Services) is the government’s shared IT operations center, whose purpose is to provide secure, stable, and cost-effective IT operations to ministries, agencies, and government institutions. A key part of its business is billing its many government clients—a process that currently runs from start to finish on the Qlik platform.
Since 2020, Stretch Qonnect has served as a technical partner in the development of Statens IT’s Qlik platform, from the technical foundation to ongoing enhancements. The result is a time-saving solution in the form of a complete digital reporting dashboard. The implementation has made it possible to achieve significant growth in the number of clients without having to scale up staff and resources accordingly.
Identified challenges
As more and more government organizations were required to transition to Statens IT, both the volume of data and its complexity increased. The original Excel-based system could not keep up, and the goal was clear: to do more with fewer people. Pernille Neville, Senior Consultant at Statens IT, explains the vision as follows:
“We could see that, unlike the rest of the government, where the goal is to have a lot of people, that wasn’t what we were interested in. We weren’t interested in having a lot of people sitting around doing routine desk work. We wanted a small number of people to do something meaningful.”
At the same time, the framework in the public sector is different from that of a typical private company. Operations must be cost-effective, as the government’s IT is benchmarked annually and must be able to compete with the market’s most competitive prices while ensuring that data remains on local servers.
The choice fell on Qlik, where granular access control and licensing economics were particularly decisive: “Because we have no choice but to go on-premises. […] Especially not in these times. Given the state of the world, the cloud is definitely not the path we’ll be taking,” says Andreas Humledal Olsen, Chief Consultant at Statens IT.
Solutions with clear standards
Together with Stretch Qonnect consultant Bjarne, Statens IT built the entire foundation of Qlik. All data is consolidated into a single shared data warehouse, which serves as the sole source for Qlik. This provides full control over where the data comes from, and the entire process, from raw data to the customer’s invoice, runs through the platform.
We built this primarily together with a consultant from Stretch Qonnect […] who helped us lay the entire foundation for Qlik. […] It’s been a fantastic collaboration. They’re incredibly skilled and a pleasure to work with.
From the start, it was a requirement that the solution be documented so that Statens IT could handle the day-to-day tasks on its own and only reach out to Stretch Qonnect for more complex issues. Pernille explains that this became a prerequisite for the entire project:
“It was actually one of our prerequisites that we needed documentation on how it worked, and that we wanted consultants who could assist us with development, because we wanted to be able to handle day-to-day tasks ourselves.”
One example of this self-service capability is the distribution of billing documents via Nprinting, where nearly 500 recipients automatically receive an email with their own data attached.
With Writeback from Stretch Qonnect’s own product suite, Qloud Cover, Statens IT’s customers can also log in and comment on their financial usage of government IT resources directly in Qlik with full governance control, rather than relying on ad-hoc emails.
Effective results – continously
The impact is most evident in the scaling. Statens IT has grown from about 100 customers in 2020 to 150–170 today—all with the same team and the same number of people handling billing, who, on top of that, only work on the task part-time:
“We started in early 2020. How many clients did we have back then? 110? Around 100 clients. Now we have about 150-170, and we have the same number of people on our billing team as we did five years ago,” explains Andreas regarding the impact of automation.
The individual processes have also become significantly easier. The manual distribution of billing materials has gone from taking days of work to less than an hour, and everything is centralized in one place and doesn’t get lost in personal inboxes. This is incredibly important in an organization with strict requirements for documentation and traceability. As Andreas points out: “We’ve gone from needing four people working for three days to spending just half an hour to an hour sending it out. […] It’s an incredible time saver.”
What the future brings
For Statens IT, the most important value is that they can continue to develop on their own and that the collaboration is easy to rely on: “We can call and say, ‘Things have really gone off the rails—can you help us for three hours? And we feel that, even if we don’t get a lot of help, we still get really good help every month.”
“Stretch Qonnect have some incredibly skilled technical people […] they know what they’re talking about […] They’re good at coming up with proposed solutions,” Andreas concludes regarding the ongoing collaboration.
As a public-sector client, Statens IT also gains access to a network of other public-sector clients, facilitated by Stretch Qonnect, where experiences can be shared across organizations and new knowledge and training on relevant tools are exchanged. Are you interested in joining this free network? Learn more by clicking the link or send an email to Head of Sales, Sophie Emilie Larsen, at sophie.larsen@stretch.dk.
About Stretch Qonnect
Stretch Qonnect helps organizations unlock the value in their data – internally for better analysis and optimization, externally to create new business models. With long experience connecting technology, data and business, we help our customers move from insight to action.
Contact
Are you looking to take your data to the next level or gain actionable insights from your data? Data analytics is applicable to every possible business area. Partnering with us provides a scalable and customized end-to-end solution, according to your needs, in close collaboration with you.
Mail: info@stretchqonnect.dk
