39,706 light fixtures, 11,585 signs, 7,252 garbage cans, 44 bridges, and 759 kilometres of road. That is a part of the very visible cocktail for which the Road and Park division in The City of Copenhagen is responsible.  The more operation and fixed assets budgets are optimized, the more resources the city can place into maintenance of the city areas.                                                 

Hjørring, July 27, 2007 - The citizens’ satisfaction with Copenhagen is often a mix of expectations and a real experience of what they get for their taxpayers’ money. Are the roads full of holes? Is waste lying in the streets, and do the playgrounds function poorly? If the answer is yes, the operational budget, which amounts to half a billion every year, very quickly becomes a political question of resources utilization. If the citizens on the other hand find that the city area is meeting their expectations, the politicians and the administration will be padded on the back for creating a well-run city in which the citizens feel that they get their money’s worth. Therefore, an overview of the city budgets is of crucial importance.   

For the absolute advantage of the citizens

The Road and Park department is popularly speaking responsible for everything that has to do with the city’s physical expression, and to secure that citizens and visitors have the best possible perception of the city space TARGIT BI Suite must hence forward frame a homogeneous basis for managing and decision making. The goal of the business intelligence solution is to provide all 250 employees in the Technical and Environmental management of the city easy access to the same data, so the management of public resources are continuously being optimized.

“So far we have had a wealth of management tools and spreadsheets that each had their individual way of seeing and doing things. With TARGIT BI suite we will get one official version of the elements in our world, and that will make it far easier for us to see different problems from new angles but always based on the same data set. This is a huge advantage which we expect will make us even better at utilizing the budget to the absolute advantage of the citizens”, says Peter Bogh, finance manager in the Road and Park division of the City of Copenhagen. He continues:

”Prior to our choice of TARGIT’s solution, we looked at other large BI suppliers and even though TARGIT world-wide is a relatively small supplier, the technology has been recognized by Microsoft. And since we already have a Microsoft SQL Server, it is our impression that we have made the very best choice and even at a lower cost. SOFTWAREIQ has implemented TARGIT BI Suite in other city departments and history shows that implementation costs have been low”, Peter Bogh says. 

Great reception

To begin with Road and Park will educate 30 TARGIT Super Users but Peter Bogh’s clear ambition is that TARGIT BI Suite will become the tool for all 250 employees when it comes to analysis and budget control. “The plan is that we will phase out all of our small management tools, but it requires TARGIT to be easier to use than all the spread sheets that flourish in our organization, and not least it requires that users will find the reports to be just as good. The general perception is that this is very much the case. And because we are similarly saving time on each report, obtain a homogeneous basis for decision making and see fewer manual errors, the users have given TARGIT BI Suite a great reception”, says Peter Bogh.   

From three days to a few hours

The implementation of Business Intelligence is part of a large quality assurance where the wish is to become better at utilizing the citizens’ tax contributions and put focus on areas where efficiency can be improved. The easy way into the large amount of data will also make it easier on administrational employees to answer questions from citizens and retrieve data for various reporting purposes. Before, it would take three days to create a special report. Now it is a question of a few hours.

”It may sound somewhat non-specific to say that we are harvesting such and such great advantages with TARGIT’s tools. But the fact alone that we are given a shared frame of reference and that we can now decide what the official figures are for our roads, lamp posts, playgrounds etc, makes it more likely that the politicians will act based on the figures in their announcements. It adds to our credibility, and we see that as a great advantage in a political world”, says Peter Bogh.

Not only a micro tool

Cooperating with SOFTWAREIQ, the technical and environmental administration is almost finished with the running-in of the city’s area and personnel data as a supplement to the many data from Microsoft Dynamics NAV. The TARGIT solution is also used for running statistics on the Road & Park yearly user satisfaction survey, where 3,000 citizens answer 200 questions about their experience of the city area.

”The survey results enable us to compare the technically evaluated quality of the roads to the experience of the citizens, and if we find great differences, we can dive even further into the figures and seek an explanation in the numbers. In this way we use business intelligence as a very concrete means to focus on areas that are important to the citizens. business intelligences is therefore not only a micro tool to our employees, but also a very central tool for us when it comes to the requirements of The Danish Agency for Governmental Management to benchmark demands for results and balanced results management,” Peter Bogh concludes.

For further information contact: info@targit.com

About TARGIT

TARGIT was founded in 1986 with the current CEO, Morten Sandlykke, as one of the founding partners. Today, TARGIT is the largest developer of business intelligence in Denmark and the core product, TARGIT Business Intelligence Suite, is distributed by more than 250 business partners around the world. The first business intelligence-product from TARGIT was based on the idea of user-friendliness, flexibility, and simple implementation; core values which have since characterized TARGIT’s solutions. TARGIT is Microsoft Gold Certified Partner within the competencies ISV/Software Solutions and Data Management Solutions.