Increasingly, the NHS has been shifting towards a more holistic view of the population it serves and its role in caring for them. There has been a deeper understanding of the reality that finding ways to understand the population as a whole and how to keep people healthy and focus on prevention rather than just treatments benefits patients’ wellbeing and helps reduce expenditure – something of increasing importance in the current climate.

Crucial to this thinking is understanding the people and population on a number of levels, and so NHS England developed the PAPI (person and population information) team to help develop insight and analytics in this area. Central to this endeavour is a set of dashboards.

The aim of these dashboards is to enable a range of users in national, regional and more local health and care systems to better understand the heath and risk factors of different cohorts of the population. This insight will support many initiatives, such as population health management, improvement in health and care services, progress towards the triple aim, recovery of services and many others.

In 2019, NHS England turned to InterWorks for support in its overall analytics strategy, and included within that was the task of overhauling and improving the PAPI product. IW has been responsible for improving and developing the dashboards (in Tableau) over two major projects since that time. In fact, the latest release version only included InterWorks built dashboards, with the remainder having become obsolete.

Doing More With Less

The NHS’s ever increasing budget cuts left the PAPI team in a difficult position to maintain the analytics central to their mission, with personnel key to data preparation and Tableau development moved on to other teams and not replaced. However, the need the insight and understanding of national and local populations has become increasingly important, with PAPI being identified as the first (of 5) national use cases for the Federated Data Platform.

Despite the loss of personnel and available budget, PAPI was able to do far more than maintain the dashboards, instead overhauling and improving the product to great success. Here is what the dashboards looked like before:

And here is what those same dashboards look like now:

Understanding Your Population and Impactful Analytics

PAPI has absolutely been able to live up to its mandate to provide deep and valuable insight into populations. Here are a few examples:

In this view, you can see quickly and clearly understand how conditions impact resources within health providers in London (the chosen filter), in terms of contacts, spend and prevalence. For example, incurable cancer stands out as a significant outlier in terms of contacts and cost, but only impacts a small population. And on the right you can see how London compares nationally.

Flexible Insight

One of the major challenges for PAPI is to please a huge range of stakeholders. Ranging from operational nurses and administrators through to C-suite execs — from individual GPs and providers through to ICBs, regions and national. InterWorks were able to bring out some of Tableau’s best features with flexible filtering and parameters, meaning that whatever your question is about your population, the chances are you’ll find a clear answer about in the data. This was no small feat considering the range of data and data structures that are interrogated within the dashboard, managing challenges features such as multimorbidity and massive numbers of rows – perhaps the largest linked health acuity dataset in world with 5.4 billion rows of linked data and up to 2.4 million unique combinations of long term conditions.

Drawing Together Dashboards and Helpful Home Pages

An area of excellence within dashboard development that gets overlooked all too often by those in the dev community is making highly accessible dashboards. This means more than just legible text and colour-blind friendly choices. It also means catering for those with lower data literacy that need the insight just as much as anyone else, and communicating choices and direction clearly to users to increase clarity, understanding and trust. Its harder than it might seem, and frequently devs overestimate how clear their logic and setup are and assume others will be able to use it in the way it was designed automatically.

InterWorks took care to augment the cutting edge analytics and deep insight within the dashboards with clear user communication, simple user journeys and helpful “About” and a content-page like “Home” dashboards. Additionally, the workbook is chock-full of helpful guides within information icons and tooltips, explaining everything from available functionality through to formula definitions and benchmark numbers.

Success Despite Significant Challenges

Over the course of the two projects, as is not uncommon, there has been a huge amount of change within the projects. Staff have left or been moved to other teams within the NHS, and the involvement of partner organisations previously responsible for design, ETL and project management has shifted. As a result, InterWorks has become increasingly responsible for areas of the product beyond the Tableau development. Being an end-to-end data consultancy, we took this in our stride and our multi-skilled consultants already on the project as well as others brought in helped to shape the data strategy and work behind the dashboards as well improving design. Jason Pickles, Head of Systems and Solutions Development at NHS England and leader of PAPI, has been the only constant besides us and, together, we have weathered a lot of storms and found creative and effective ways to deliver the quality product PAPI is today.

Balancing Stakeholders’ Priorities and Input

There are not many roles within the NHS that can’t draw some benefit from the insight on the population that PAPI provides. Therefore, there are a lot of people from a lot of places who have wanted to have their say on where PAPI should go and what it should look like. Those who know the NHS well will also understand the political challenges and ambiguity that often goes alongside this kind of reality. Jason has done an outstanding job of managing all of this, but he tells us that we have helped along the way, leveraging our wider NHS connections and relationships to help steady the ship and navigate often turbulent waters.

In Conclusion

Overall, this has been a special project for us here at InterWorks, with the opportunity to shape a key function within the NHS and use a wide range of our expertise and skills. Trust and connection have grown steadily over the project and we have been given the freedom to help develop work that we at InterWorks and those in the NHS are all extremely proud of.

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Simply’s mission is conveniently wrapped up in the URL to their website: simplygetresults.com. Dedicated to helping employers and employees get the right skills, leveraging innovations in data and machine learning, Simply wants to rectify the growing skill gap problem found in an ever-changing world.

With such strong attention to helping others with self-improvement, it’s no surprise that Simply takes their self-improvement as a company just as seriously. This drive is ultimately what led them to rethink how they deliver insights internally and to their growing list of customers.

An External Analytics Use Case with Finastra

Simply is no stranger to working with people data at scale. Organisational-scale upskilling involves activating thousands of employees with meaningful data, insight and options. As an example, Simply has been supporting global provider of financial software applications and marketplaces, Finastra, on their skills journey. With over 8,000 employees and an open mind, Finastra represented the perfect opportunity for Simply to create new mode of insight delivery.

To help them with the technical buildout, they reached out to the InterWorks UK team. Finding the right mix of solutions didn’t take long for Simply and InterWorks. That framework was comprised of four key puzzle pieces: Tableau Cloud, Snowflake, Okta and Curator by InterWorks.

At the foundational level was Snowflake, a Cloud Data Platform that is highly performant, scalable and functional for organizations big and small. Snowflake’s ability to transform data from multiple sources and prime it for analysis makes it the ideal backbone for any modern insight-delivery system. InterWorks was able to get Snowflake up and running in record time via a Snowflake Rapid Start.

Sitting on top of Snowflake is the analytics workhorse: Tableau Software. Simply already owned a Tableau Server instance, so they were familiar with the power and beauty of Tableau’s visual analytics capabilities. That said, the Finastra use case presented an opportunity to move to Tableau Cloud, which made it easy to share valuable insight without complex administrative hassle for Simply or Finastra.

Simply didn’t want to stop there, however. Rather than giving Finastra a factory-default sort of experience, they needed to create something more personalised. That’s where Curator by InterWorks played a pivotal role. Curator by InterWorks gives organizations like Simply the power to fully augment their analytics experience, allowing for even more tailored design and navigation options, as well as advanced functionality and security.

In a nutshell, Simply would be able to take the insight dashboards built in Tableau and embed them in a custom-branded Employee Skills Portal that is totally unique to Finastra. The final piece to the puzzle, yet no less essential, was the inclusion of Okta to provide seamless and secure user administration features, which make managing 8,000 users far easier.

How It’s Going Now

Thanks to Simply’s amazing work in understanding Finastra’s needs and InterWorks’ expert technical aid, Finastra has a Skills and Career Navigator tailored to their needs, helping employees understand their critical skills, career options and gap analyses. This is all linked up to their existing internal systems in a seamless, unobtrusive way.

Finally, as an InterWorks PRO customer, Simply’s solutions are upkept with world-class guidance from the global InterWorks team. We were honored to work with a great team like Simply and support their goal to help take the pain away from having robust skills insight and infrastructure. We’re also excited to see how Simply continues to use their modern analytics stack to serve other major global employers.

“Our partnership with InterWorks enables us to support the world’s biggest, most demanding organisations with confidence.”

– John Guy, CEO, Simply

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Asthma Australia is a national nonprofit organisation whose purpose is to help people breathe better so they can live freely. Asthma is a respiratory condition that affects nearly 2.8 million Australians, with children being the most impacted. Asthma is responsible for at least one Australian death every day, making it a serious health concern. In 2022-23, over 31,000 people were hospitalised due to asthma, yet more than 90% of these hospitalisations were potentially preventable. Despite the prevalence of asthma, it is often misunderstood, causing fear and anxiety for those living with the condition.

However, there is hope. Asthma Australia has been the leading charity for people with asthma and their communities for over 60 years. The challenges of climate change, unhealthy air and health inequity make it more important than ever for people with asthma to have a voice. We search for new and progressive approaches to challenge the status quo. Our work is grounded in evidence and centred on the experiences of people affected by asthma. We believe by listening to those living with asthma, designing solutions with them and influencing change, people with asthma can live freely, unrestricted by their asthma.

Asthma Australia works directly with people living with asthma and their caregivers, as well as education and healthcare professionals, to deliver person-centered support to keep people living well where they live, learn, work and play. They also work tirelessly to advocate for policy and systems changes to improve outcomes for people with asthma and their carers.

Asthma Australia places the voice of people with asthma at the centre of their work, and combines it with data and evidence to make informed decisions. They engage with over 650,000 people each year across a range of channels. Their data shows that 37% of people who have completed more than one Asthma Control Questionnaire online or over the phone improved their control or remained well controlled. Perhaps most impressive of all, is their work is co-designed with the people they serve, allowing for solutions that will likely have a greater impact.

“Personally, I’m really motivated to work at Asthma Australia because it has real impact. If people have the right access and information, they can completely change the way they live.”

– Kathy Packenas, Director – Customer and Marketing, Asthma Australia

Unification Through Digital Transformation

Asthma Australia and its’ former Asthma Foundations have long been a data-centric organisation, but the way they interacted with data changed drastically in 2017 when six state and territory-level organisations merged to form Asthma Australia as we know it today. This resulted in the need for Asthma Australia rationalise and streamline its data and technology infrastructure to truly unify their goals and operations. The transformation journey began with a massive new brand effort spearheaded by Kathy Packenas, Director – Customer and Marketing at Asthma Australia. With direct input from Asthma Australia customers, she and her team retooled the look, language and overarching purpose of Asthma Australia to reflect the needs and desires of people living with asthma.

To further embed their focus on person-centric approaches, as Asthma Australia implemented a customer experience framework, requiring a single view of the customer to enable personalised engagement and journeys. At this time, a data audit revealed they were working with over 30 data repositories with five being most used. This was sometimes challenging as different CRMs served different functions, often resulting in the need for manual reconciliation of customer records across each CRM. They were able to whittle the number of data repositories down to four after some consolidation, but any further effort necessitated more specific IT and data skills. A digital transformation program was then instigated to consolidate data enabling improved customer journeys, a single view of customer and improved customer experience. It resulted in a major service redesign and integration of all major customer and marketing technologies.

It was at this point that Asthma Australia brought on Nick Gillan in the role of Technology and Data Governance Manager to help them go further with data platforms and the more technical parts of the larger digital transformation initiative. Kathy and team had done a wonderful job of creating a new digital front end, and Nick’s focus would be on shoring up the technologic foundation to support that.

“We had a lot of data sitting in disparate locations, so finding an accurate and validated single source of truth was a challenge prior to the work with InterWorks.”

– Nick Gillan, Technology and Data Governance Manager, Asthma Australia

Just prior to Nick’s arrival, Asthma Australia had built a technology stack defined use cases in the customer area and included Active Campaign as a configurable CRM, WordPress, Gravity Forms, Shopify, Thinkific and Funraisin and Power BI for visual analytics. Acquiring all those tools was great progress but getting them all to work together seamlessly was a bit more challenging. As a starting point, Nick suggested spending some time focusing on the enterprise-level data foundation to get stakeholders across the organisation on the same page. To aid in this process, he reached out to InterWorks Australia to come conduct a Strategy, Vision and Roadmapping (SVR) session.

Furthering the Data Conversation

SVRs are highly customisable, resulting in a series of technical recommendations and options that customers can then act on. SVRs can also include special workshops or other unique consulting applications based on client need. Nick and Kathy worked directly with InterWorks Managing Director, APAC, Robert Curtis and Account Executive Angela Kang to conduct just such a workshop. This manifested in a “Data FUNdamentals Day” that brought together stakeholders and data users from across the organisation for a day of active learning and collaboration. In fact, nearly 50% of the organisation’s staff were present.

By getting everyone in the same room and talking about data, Asthma Australia was able to better align departmental goals with broader organisational goals, explore different data use cases and identify potential inefficiencies or opportunities across the organisation. Perhaps most useful of all is that the day provided an opportunity for people to engage with others who have a vested interest in using data more effectively, establishing more common ground and interest in growing a more data-driven culture.

“I really enjoyed the way Rob was able to communicate complex topics in a simple way. The output of the SVR was easy to understand, and the process was inclusive.”

– Kathy Packenas, Director – Customer and Marketing, Asthma Australia

Moving Forward with a Clearer Direction

Asthma Australia’s attention now turns to reinforcing their findings from the Data FUNdamentals Day they held and then executing the recommendations from their larger SVR. Part of this includes exploring the acquisition of a true data platform to underpin the rest of their technology stack. Such a platform would not only serve as a single source of truth, but it would also save considerable time and effort when it comes to data engineering and transformation processes.

It’s still early days for Asthma Australia, but they’ve already made considerable progress getting everyone on the same page in terms of data foundation and fundamentals. The work they’ve done thus far to improve how they interact with their data has already made it easier to find relevant insights. Those insights in turn help them to serve out their mission of improving better health outcomes in their customers. The act of strengthening that foundation and becoming even more data-driven means more lives improved and even saved, as well as a healthier Australia for years to come. This is perhaps best captured in a response that Kathy gave her colleague Nick as to what data means to them:

“Data is an essential element of our business. In fact, it’s an organisational principle. It tells us who our customers are, who they should be, if they’re having a good experience when they engage with us, and it shows us where things go wrong and where we can improve. It tells us if our work is actually having an impact on people with asthma.”

– Kathy Packenas, Director – Customer and Marketing, Asthma Australia

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The NHS Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC) is an umbrella organization for healthcare innovation in the UK, established in 2018. It is a unique partnership of patient groups, government, industry and NHS bodies working together to streamline the introduction of new innovations into the healthcare system. The AAC supports all types of innovation: medicines, diagnostics, devices, digital products, pathway changes and new workforce models.

Key Data Challenges

NHS AAC faced several key challenges. Differing priorities across various groups made it difficult to maintain consistent progress on their analytics journey. High staff turnover disrupted continuity and diluted the impact of existing initiatives. In addition, the various reporting tools used to track performance and progress lacked standardization, making it difficult to analyse and apply data. Together, these issues hindered the organization’s ability to adopt a truly data-driven culture. To address these challenges, NHS AAC approached InterWorks to support the entire analysis process from user requirements gathering to prototyping and report development.

InterWorks’ Approach and Solutions

InterWorks began with a thorough user requirements gathering process, engaging with all relevant stakeholders through five focus groups to capture a comprehensive set of needs and objectives. This foundational step was critical in aligning the direction of the project with the expectations of the NHS AAC.

Next, the teams moved into the prototyping phase, creating iterative models of the proposed solutions. This phase was characterized by regular feedback loops, ensuring that each iteration was refined and improved based on stakeholder input.

The final phase involved the development and deployment of detailed reports tailored to the specific needs of NHS AAC. Using Tableau, InterWorks developed robust dashboards to track performance and progress. These tools were designed to be intuitive and accessible, allowing users to easily derive actionable insights.

Apart from developing dashboard solutions for each of the five teams, InterWorks followed its own Design Thinking for Data methodology, outlined in the Solution Design Sprint. Inspired by Google Ventures’ Design Sprints, this approach applies human-centered design principles to clarify business intelligence problems. It particularly focuses on the initial problem statement and key metrics, and rapidly prototype these solutions for immediate feedback. The Solution Design Sprint consists of four phases: Clarify, Ideate, Prototype, and Evaluate.

Above: The Solution Design Sprint.

In the Clarify phase, InterWorks focused on clarifying the problem statement, agreeing on the team’s mission and goals, identifying pain points and uncovering the “why” behind those pain points. This was followed by the Ideate phase, which generated a wide range of ideas through effective and creative brainstorming sessions. During the Prototyping stage, virtual workshops were held to create mockups of the data solutions. Finally, in the Assess phase, InterWorks conducted iterations to implement the necessary changes and move the teams from outdated analytics methods to improved and efficient solutions.

Above: The Abstract Ladder exercise.

An effective exercise from these workshops was the Abstract Ladder exercise. This technique helps uncover the root cause of a problem by repeatedly asking, “Why?” Starting with an initial problem statement, each subsequent “why” question digs deeper, revealing another layer of the problem. For example, if the problem is something simple as, “I overslept and missed my gym class this morning,” the first “why” question might reveal, “Because I went to bed late. Another “why” question might reveal, “Because I was on my cell phone late into the night.” This process continues until the root cause is identified. In this case, it was a lack of evening routine. By identifying the root cause, more effective solutions can be developed to prevent the problem from recurring. We used the same exercise to identify organizational goals and missions for each of the NHS AAC teams.

Measurable Outcomes and Benefits

The results of this collaboration were significant. NHS AAC experienced notable improvements in their ability to track performance and progress across various sub-departments. Key stakeholders reported high levels of satisfaction with the new reporting tools, highlighting the clarity and usefulness of the data provided. These positive results demonstrated the value of InterWorks’ customized approach using design thinking methods and set a precedent for future projects.

The InterWorks team did a fantastic job facilitating several workshops for our Programme, using interactive tools and expert facilitation to draw out information about our data inputs. The team helped us understand each data input in more detail, prioritise and categorise these based on usage, and drafted charts for us to consider how we want to visualise our data. The InterWorks team were a pleasure to work with, adapting their engagement approach and content based on our Programme’s needs and effectively supporting our team to use tools they were previously unfamiliar with, to make best use of the time.

– Tania Tailor, Senior Manager – Consultancy, Data for R&D

Several important lessons were learned from this project. First, the importance of gathering comprehensive user requirements. This step ensures that the final solutions are both relevant and effective. Second, the iterative prototyping phase proved invaluable, allowing for flexibility and responsiveness to stakeholder feedback and changing reporting requirements. Finally, the use of advanced analytics tools such as Tableau greatly enhanced NHS AAC’s ability to track and analyze performance across different sub-programs. Explore some of the top dashboards created for end users below.

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KSK-Immobilien, eine Tochtergesellschaft der Kreissparkasse Köln, ist mit über 25 Jahren Erfahrung und 50 Standorten der größte Immobilienmakler im Rheinland.

Ob es um den Kauf, Verkauf oder die Vermietung von Immobilien geht, das vorrangige Ziel von KSK-Immobilien ist es, seinen Kunden ein sorgenfreies und unkompliziertes Erlebnis zu bieten. Während ein Großteil dieser Erfahrung durch kundenorientierte Dienstleistungen geprägt ist, spielen die Daten und Systeme hinter den Kulissen eine ebenso wichtige Rolle.

Um Kunden besser zu bedienen und den Zugang zu Erkenntnissen für die eigenen Mitarbeiter zu optimieren, entschied sich KSK-Immobilien, seine Datenarchitektur zu modernisieren, und bat InterWorks um Hilfe.

Planung der idealen Daten- und Analyseplattform

Die Planung der idealen Daten- und Analyseplattform begann mit der Finanzabteilung von KSK-Immobilien. Obwohl das bestehende System funktionsfähig war, erkannten sie den Mehrwert einer hochmodernen Data-Warehousing-Lösung sowie benutzerfreundlicher Analysen für alle Benutzer. Als großer Immobilienmakler mit einer Vielzahl von Transaktionen, die hauptsächlich im ERP-System namens OnOffice verwaltet werden, benötigte KSK eine Lösung, die Daten aus verschiedenen Quellen und Formaten integrieren konnte.

Das InterWorks-Team unter der Leitung von Regional Practice Lead Paul Vincent schlug sofort einen cloudbasierten Analytics-Stack, bestehend aus AWS, Matillion, Snowflake und Tableau Cloud vor. Matillion sollte ein intuitiveres ETL-Erlebnis bieten, und die Daten sollten nahtlos zu Snowflake verschoben werden. Mit Snowflake als hochleistungsfähiger und einfach skalierbarer Cloud-Datenplattform wäre die Daten-Staging, -Transformation und -Governance sofort verfügbar, um saubere Daten für die Analyse in Tableau Cloud bereitzustellen. Die Benutzerfreundlichkeit von Tableau Cloud würde es KSK-Immobilien-Analysten erleichtern, ansprechende Berichte zu erstellen, die für Stakeholder im gesamten Unternehmen zugänglich wären.

Die Lösung entwickeln

Der Fortschritt in Richtung des modernen Daten- und Analyse-Stacks von KSK-Immobilien begann mit einem Snowflake und einem Matillion Rapid Start, die als Grundlage für die neue Plattform dienten und schnell funktionsfähig waren. Chaitanya Joshi, Leiter der InterWorks Services, richtete Skripte ein, um historische Daten herunterzuladen und über Matillion zu importieren. Barbara Hartmann, Data Engineer bei InterWorks, entwickelte eine nachhaltige Lösung zur automatisierten täglichen Datenextraktion aus den Systemen von KSK-Immobilien in die neue Cloud-Datenplattform. Entscheidend war, dass die gesamte Plattform über einen direkten Zugriff auf das CRM OnOffice von KSK-Immobilien verfügte, für welches ein spezieller Authentifizierungsmechanismus notwendig ist.

Zusätzlich zu den Datenarchitekturarbeiten unterstützte das InterWorks-Team KSK-Immobilien bei der Entwicklung der Geschäftslogik zur Automatisierung der komplexen Provisionsberechnung. Dies eliminierte den manuellen Aufwand in Excel und ermöglichte zeitnahe und genaue Daten zu den Maklerprovisionen, was KSK-Immobilien einen verbesserten Einblick in die monatlichen und sogar täglichen Zahlen verschaffte.

Sofortige Ergebnisse und kontinuierliches Wachstum

Die neue Daten- und Analyseplattform führte zu zahlreichen Verbesserungen der Analysequalität und des gesamten Datenerlebnisses von KSK-Immobilien, erfüllte das Versprechen schnellerer Erkenntnisse innerhalb der Finanzabteilung und inspirierte andere Abteilungen zu neuen Datenprojekten. Die Verwaltung der Tableau Cloud, wie z.B. das Hinzufügen von neuen Nutzern, ist äußerst benutzerfreundlich, was auch auf die allgemeine Skalierbarkeit der Gesamtlösung zurückzuführen ist.

Durch die herausragende Dokumentation und Schulungen von InterWorks konnte das KSK-Immobilien-Team eigenständig neue Endpunkte implementieren, neue Anwendungsfälle entdecken und ansprechende Berichte und neue Ansichten ihrer Daten zu erstellen.

Dank einer klaren Vision und Investition in das Projekt verfügt KSK-Immobilien nun über eine hochmoderne Daten- und Analyseplattform, die ihnen einen starken Wettbewerbsvorteil verschafft.

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Zukunftsmotor ist ein innovatives Schulungsinstitut, das darauf ausgerichtet ist, arbeitssuchende Personen auf Karrieren in der Technologiebranche vorzubereiten. In enger Zusammenarbeit mit der Bundesagentur für Arbeit unterstützen sie die Programmteilnehmer dabei, technische und soziale Fähigkeiten zu entwickeln, die auf dem Markt sehr gefragt sind. Letztendlich ist ihr Ziel, diese Personen mit Unternehmen in Verbindung zu bringen, um deren offene Stellen zu besetzen. Das Ergebnis sind stärkere Arbeitskräfte und eine lebendigere Gesellschaft, die denen hilft, die Hilfe benötigen.

Die Reise zur datengesteuerten Organisation

Als kleinere Organisation verfügt Zukunftsmotor nicht über spezialisiertes IT- oder Datenpersonal. Dennoch ist ihnen klar, wie wichtig zeitnahe Erkenntnisse für fundierte Entscheidungen und das Erreichen ihrer Ziele sind. Der erste Schritt auf dieser Reise war der Kauf von Salesforce, um ihre Prozesse besser zu strukturieren und bessere Aufzeichnungen über die Kundenaktivitäten zu führen. Mit zunehmender Nutzung von Salesforce stieg auch die Nachfrage nach effizienteren Erkenntnissen. Sie standen vor einigen Entscheidungen, wie z.B. wie viele Personen sie in ihrem System benötigen und ob sie bei Salesforce CRM:Analytics bleiben oder auf etwas Robusteres wie die Tableau-Software umsteigen sollten?

Um sie bei diesem Entscheidungsprozess zu unterstützen, wandte sich der CEO von Zukunftsmotor an einen alten Freund bei InterWorks, Justus Niemzok. Justus führte Zukunftsmotor durch die Vor- und Nachteile mehrerer Optionen und gab ihnen einen umfassenden Überblick über die Möglichkeiten. Unter Nutzung der engen Partnerschaft von InterWorks mit Tableau entschied sich Zukunftsmotor für diesen Weg und kaufte Tableau Cloud und Tableau Desktop. Sie begannen, die Plattform eine Zeit lang auf eigene Faust zu erkunden, bis Anfang 2024, als sie ihre Strategiesitzung abhielten, um Ziele für das Jahr festzulegen. Eine der wichtigsten Prioritäten war die Notwendigkeit, schneller eine datengesteuerte Organisation zu werden. Deshalb wandten sie sich erneut an InterWorks, um mehr praktische Hilfe zur Beschleunigung ihrer Reise zu erhalten.

Fortschritte beschleunigen mit einem Dashboarding-Sprint von InterWorks

Das InterWorks-Team begann sofort mit einem dreiwöchigen Tableau-Dashboarding-Sprint. Zunächst führte das InterWorks-Team persönliche Auftaktgespräche mit Stakeholdern von Zukunftsmotors Vertriebs- und Learningexperienceteams durch, um zu verstehen, welche Anforderungen ihre Dashboards erfüllen mussten, um nützlich zu sein. Sie identifizierten über 30 einzigartige Anforderungen, die auf 10 verschiedenen Dashboards angewendet werden sollten. Das Vertriebsteam wollte klare und genaue Funnels, um ihnen bei der besseren Organisation ihrer täglichen Abläufe zu helfen. Das Lernerfahrungsteam wollte Teilnehmerdemografien sowie Kennzahlen wie Anwesenheitsquoten, Stornierungsquoten und Erfolgsquoten für Teilnehmer verfolgen, eine Anstellung zu finden. Obwohl Zukunftsmotor nicht auf Basis von Erfolgsquoten bezahlt wird, haben sie einen starken internen Antrieb für qualitativ hochwertigen Service und positive Ergebnisse. Vor allem wollten sie in der Lage sein, die Auswirkungen, die sie mit Daten erzielen, zu untermauern.

In wenigen Wochen einen Unterschied machen

Unter Verwendung umfangreicher Kenntnisse über bewährte Verfahren beim Dashboarding gelang es InterWorks, die Tableau-Dashboards von Zukunftsmotor rechtzeitig zu erstellen. Die Auswirkungen auf ihre Operationen waren nahezu sofort spürbar, mit neuer und verbesserter Transparenz über alle Anforderungen und Kennzahlen, die Zukunftsmotor von Anfang an identifiziert hatte. Es ist erwähnenswert, dass die Möglichkeit für Zukunftsmotor, sich so schnell in Tableau Cloud einzurichten, zuvor noch nie dagewesen ist. Das Einrichten und Hosten eines Servers war in der Vergangenheit, selbst unter den besten Umständen, eine zeitaufwändige Angelegenheit. Aber Zukunftsmotor nutzte die schnelle Einrichtung und die Benutzerfreundlichkeit von Tableau Cloud voll aus und holte sich dann mit Hilfe von Experten Unterstützung, um ihre Dashboarding-Bemühungen mit InterWorks anzustoßen. Das Ergebnis ist ein lebendige und wachsende Analysebasis, die innerhalb eines Monats Gestalt annahm. Während Zukunftsmotor ihre Zukunft und die ihrer Teilnehmer navigiert, werden sie jetzt zuverlässige Daten haben, um ihre Entscheidungen zu unterstützen. Tatsächlich ist Zukunftsmotor mit dem Fortschritt so zufrieden, dass sie nun erwägen Tableau und InterWorks in allen anderen Unternehmensteilen einzusetzen. Die Reise geht weiter.

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Zukunftsmotor is an innovative training institute geared towards preparing employment-seeking individuals for careers in technology. Working closely with the Bundesagentur für Arbeit, they help program participants develop technical and soft skills that are highly sought after in the market. Ultimately, their goal is connecting these individuals with companies to fill their open vacancies. The result is a stronger workforce and a more vibrant society that helps those in need.

The Journey to Becoming a Data-Driven Organization

As a smaller organization, Zukunftsmotor doesn’t have dedicated IT or data staff. Nevertheless, they understand well how important timely insights are to making informed decisions and reaching their goals. The first step on this journey was purchasing Salesforce to better structure their processes and keep better records of customer activity. As their usage of Salesforce increased, so did the demand for more streamlined insights. They were faced with a few decisions, such as how many people do they need in their system, and should they stick with CRM analytics or go with something more robust like Tableau Software?

To assist them in the decision-making process, Zukunftsmotor’s CEO reached out to an old friend at InterWorks, Justus Niemzok. Justus walked the Zukunftsmotor through the pros and cons of several options, giving them a full view of the possibilities. Leveraging InterWorks close partnership with Tableau, Zukunftsmotor decided to go that route and purchased Tableau Cloud and Tableau Desktop. They began exploring the platform for a time on their own, until early 2024 when they held their strategy meeting to outline goals for the year. A top priority was the need to become a more data-driven organization more quickly. So, they reached out to InterWorks again for more hands-on help in accelerating their journey.

Accelerating Progress with an InterWorks Dashboarding Sprint

The InterWorks team got right to work with a three-week Tableau dashboarding sprint. First, the InterWorks team held in-person kickoff meetings with stakeholders from Zukunftsmotor’s Sales and Learning Experience teams to understand what requirements their dashboards needed to meet to be useful. They identified over 30 unique requirements that would be applied to 10 different dashboards.

The Sales team wanted clear and accurate funnels to help them better organize their day-to-day operations. The Learning Experience team wanted to track participant demographics as well as metrics like show-up rates, cancellation rates and success rates for participants who find employment. Though Zukunftsmotor is not paid based on success rates, they have a strong internal drive for quality service and positive outcomes. More than anything, they wanted to be able to back up the impact they make with data.

Making a Difference in a Matter of Weeks

Using extensive dashboarding best practices knowledge, InterWorks was able to build Zukunftsmotor’s Tableau dashboards right on schedule. The impact on their operations was near immediate, with new and improved visibility across all the requirements and metrics Zukunftsmotor identified from the outset. It’s worth mentioning that Zukunftsmotor’s ability to get set up in Tableau Cloud so quickly is previously unheard of. Setting up and hosting a server in the past, even under the best circumstances, was a time-consuming affair. But Zukunftsmotor took full advantage of Tableau Cloud’s rapid setup and ease of use, then brought in expert help to jump start their dashboarding efforts with InterWorks. The result is a vibrant and growing analytics core that came to fruition in the span of one month.

As Zukunftsmotor navigates their future and that of their participants, they will now have reliable data to support their decisions. In fact, Zukunftsmotor is so pleased with the progress that several other departments within the organization are beginning to ask how Tableau and InterWorks can make an impact on their operations.

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The overarching aim of the Workforce, Training and Education (WTE) directorate within NHS England is to ensure the healthcare system has a sufficient and inclusive workforce with the knowledge, skills, values and behaviours to deliver compassionate, high-quality health and care to the people it serves.

Formerly as part of Health Education England (HEE) and now as part of NHS England, the WTE analytics function provides high-quality data resources, collections, analysis and analytical products to NHS users related to workforce and education insights.

Insights for a Changing System

The NHS’ establishment of Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) in July 2022 came with evolving requirements for them to better understand their health care workforces and education pipelines. With these systemic changes, HEE identified that the system needed a way to access their existing workforce planning intelligence and expert knowledge in a more considered way. HEE needed something that that would prevent multiple local reporting solutions proliferating, while supporting the principles of building “once for all” and seeking a single source of the truth across the system.

Key to the solution would be the ability to offer a better presented and accessible connection to the existing expert analysis and insights, while also allowing for product ranges to be curated for different audiences. The platform needed to maintain a connection to HEE’s well-established Tableau and data infrastructure to minimise duplication and reduce burden. Finally the solution needed to be easy to install, fast to develop and agile enough to continually adapt.

Creating the Ideal Analytics Presentation Layer

After evaluating a number of options, the WTE analytics team chose Curator by InterWorks to provide easy access to existing and new Tableau products. Curator integrated with the organisation’s mature Tableau infrastructure and gave the team a simple, zero-code way to develop their existing products and present them to the new audience. The resulting platform is the NHS England Workforce Intelligence Portal. By helping HEE to quickly build an engaging and flexible user experience, Curator improved the quality and consistency of workforce information for their key users and stakeholders.

Enthusiastic Engagement

Since launching the Portal the analytical team has rolled out three phases of products to users. Requests for access have steadily increased and the platform now has thousands of active users, constituting an increasingly large proportion of overall users of the data service.

“Though originally targeted at ICSs, there is now engagement with the portal from across the NHS. Engagement with users indicates their enthusiasm with what has been delivered and an audience keen to help the team develop the service and products further.”

– Tom Inkelaar, Senior Manager, NHS England

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Vivun is an AI-powered presales platform that helps companies grow by automating sales demos, identifying risks in deal pipelines and aligning product roadmaps with customer needs to drive revenue. Vivun has a deep understanding of the complex and valuable data that comes from tracking opportunities from open to close. This granular data provides powerful insights into pipeline health and the overall growth of an organization. Vivun’s clients include tech leaders such as Snowflake, Zoom and Gainsight.

Pursuing Opportunity Insights from Open to Close

Vivun’s primary objective was to build a solution that could communicate clear and actionable insights throughout the entire opportunity lifecycle. Such insights could help answer valuable business questions like:

• How much revenue have we lost to competitors?
• Which opportunities are at risk because they are stuck in a particular presales stage?
• Based on our historical win rates, do we have enough potential revenue in our pipeline or do we need to generate more opportunities?

Uncovering the answers to these questions is typically difficult for companies to derive from the granular and disparate data that comes from tracking opportunities from open to close. For Vivun, this meant that they would need to create an elegant data model with carefully defined logic that would then seamlessly feed into well-designed and user-friendly analytics dashboards. To give this initiative an extra lift, they turned to the full-stack consulting team at InterWorks.

“InterWorks, and Keith Dykstra in particular, were a pleasure to work with. They adapted to our pace, our mode of operation. Their flexibility made them a natural extension to our team immediately.”

– Thierry D’Hers, Chief Product & Engineering Officer, Vivun

Working Through Complexity and Prioritizing UX

The collaboration between Vivun and InterWorks can be broken down into three key phases:

Data Modeling

Vivun was an incredibly thoughtful and organized client. They kicked off the project with a well-defined entity relationship diagram (ERD), a clear data dictionary and a representative mock environment. The InterWorks team worked closely with them to understand the analysis they wanted to present to their customers so we could build the necessary data models in Tableau. Because they were dealing with high volume data, we advised them throughout the process about the trade-offs to consider between developing the most ideal solution vs. developing a performant solution. From day one, we worked together to make smart decisions that would result in insightful and fast dashboards.

Metric Definition and Validation

Delivering the right insights required building logic in Tableau to transform the raw data into the metrics we needed. Sometimes these metrics required a few layers of logic that required careful validation. We worked iteratively with the Vivun team to define and test the logic. In many cases, we not only developed the calculations and visualizations, but also validation sheets that could help the Vivun team and their customers confirm that their metrics were defined correctly. We carefully considered edge cases that might skew the data to ensure we were providing Vivun customers with very precise insights.

Data Visualization and UX

The Vivun team kicked off the project with a few rough wireframes indicating an initial vision for the project. As we worked together, we quickly discovered new questions that customers might want to answer. What started out as four Tableau dashboards quickly turned into over a dozen different views to help customers understand what was going on in their sales pipeline. As we narrowed in on the right metric definitions and began visualizing those metrics for users to see, the Vivun team circulated our draft dashboards for internal feedback. This gave us a much richer understanding of the types of questions users wanted to answer with the data. We iteratively rearranged and added new views to respond to users’ feedback.

As we settled into arrangements that made sense, we layered in context through the Viz in Tooltip functionality in Tableau as well as flexibility with buttons and parameter actions. We wanted the dashboards to anticipate the deeper questions and alternative options users might want to explore. We also refined the style to fit with the Vivun brand and to reduce any visual distractions from the data.

“The visual design and craftsmanship of the dashboards were of upmost quality and surpassed our expectations.”

– Thierry D’Hers, Chief Product & Engineering Officer, Vivun

The Final Tableau Dashboards

In the end, we ended up with four different Tableau workbooks and fourteen unique Tableau dashboards, all of which are available to download for free through the Tableau Exchange. Vivun’s customers can simply download and enter their own credentials to get instant analysis of their sales pipeline. Vivun now provides their customers with more visibility into their sales pipeline, allowing users to identify opportunities for improvement. The dashboards also give Vivun customers the ability to spot red flags and other patterns in their customer base. Not least of all, Vivun’s platform can give recommendations on how to improve their sales performance.

“My favorite part of working with InterWorks was their ability to present new ways of thinking and visualizing the answers to our customers’ questions. In the end, we created something that was the product of both of our respective areas of expertise and far better than what we could have done alone.”

– Amanda Wolf, Product Manager, Vivun

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With a history stretching back to 1934, Fujifilm is a globally recognized leader in the areas of healthcare, materials and imaging. Their mission has always been to leverage technology and innovation to build a healthier and more sustainable world. With massive reach in commercial and consumer settings, Fujifilm has positively impacted millions of people throughout their nearly 100 years of history.

Developing Next-Gen Remote Diagnostics Software

Fujifilm has an incredibly diverse portfolio of products and services, but imaging and printing have been a key strength of theirs from the beginning. As it pertains to printing platforms, they’re continuously pushing boundaries and looking for ways to improve how their customers interact with these products.

So, when Fujfilm began introducing new platforms to their wide format printing portfolio, they asked themselves how they could enrich the customer experience by revamping their approach to remote diagnostics to gather better analytics from their printers. Prior to the project, there wasn’t an easy way for Acuity Ultra and Acuity Prime customers to record print data. In some instances, the data existed in their software, though it was difficult to access. In other instances, the data wasn’t usable or in a format that could be exported. In some rare cases, the data didn’t exist at all. Additionally, Fujifilm themselves had little visibility on how customers were using their printers.

Recognizing these limitations, Fujifilm set to task and remedied their baseline data issues. With their printers now populating data reliably, their next question was, “What do we do with it?” To answer this question, Fujifilm knew they would need additional expertise and resources outside of their organization. They required a multi-disciplined partner that could build a holistic solution that could navigate the intricacies of their data and present the most relevant insights in a polished, branded, front-end dashboard. After some research, InterWorks emerged as a great all-in-one partner.

Building the Right Data Platform

Building a sustainable data platform for a use case like Fujifilm’s requires much more than simple dashboarding, but the InterWorks team knew the ideal data platform for the job, which can be divided into four main stages:

1. Source Data: Fujifilm’s centralized file store, where the CSV files from machines are sent, as well as Salesforce, which contains customer data.
2. Data Layer: The Snowflake Data Platform as Fujifilm’s database, where data is prepared and stored for analytics.
3. Analytics Layer: Tableau Software, which is an easy-to-use analytics platform that lets users build and share visual analytics at scale.
4. Presentation Layer: Curator by InterWorks, which enables Fujifilm to embed Tableau dashboards into a branded, accessible and well-governed UI.

Phase 1: Source Data & Proof of Concept

The first phase of the project began with InterWorks and Fujifilm identifying the scope of the project and diving into the source data to build Tableau dashboards as a proof of concept. The InterWorks team set to building these dashboards using CSV files generated from the Acuity Ultra and Acuity Primer platforms as well as customer data from Salesforce. By bringing these data sources together, Fujifilm could build external-facing views that showed diagnostics for customers as well as internal-facing views to see how those customers were using their printers.

Phase 2: Snowflake as the Data Layer

With data being generated from the Acuity Ultra and Acuity Prime platforms, one of the foundational challenges was where to store that data and prepare it for analysis. InterWorks proposed the Snowflake Data Cloud hosted via AWS as the ideal database for Fujifilm’s needs as it is easily scalable and highly performant.

InterWorks got Fujifilm up to speed quickly with a Snowflake Rapid Start, then configured Fujifilm’s Snowflake instance for automatic loading of CSV files from their printers. By implementing row-level security within Snowflake, they could ensure that all customer data remained secure and separate from each other.

Phase 3: Tableau Software as the Analytics Layer

For the analytics and dashboard-building portion of the project, InterWorks continued with Tableau due to its ease of use and integration-rich environment. The first part of this phase began with requirement gathering for Fujifilm’s official dashboards. With those requirements outlined, the project shifted back to Snowflake where InterWorks began preparing data for analysis in Tableau. With that connection sorted, the actual building of Tableau dashboards began, and Fujifilm went with Tableau Cloud for both convenience and performance in hosting those dashboards.

Phase 4: Curator by InterWorks as the Presentation Layer

While Tableau Cloud certainly allows for sharing analytics dashboards with various users, Fujifilm knew they wanted something a little more bespoke. Early on in the project, they identified the need for their dashboard to exist in a custom, branded UI that integrated even more seamlessly with their Acuity Ultra and Acuity Prime software.

To help them build this presentation layer, InterWorks recommended Curator by InterWorks. Curator would allow Fujifilm to embed their dashboards in a customizable UI while providing even more functionality on top of Tableau Cloud. Chief among Curator’s benefits is its ability to deliver external analytics, keeping customer data accessible and secure to relevant audiences only. Essentially, Curator would be the key to delivering individualized print data to Acuity Ultra and Prime customers. Curator could also be used for internal-facing embedded analytics, giving Fujifilm easier access to printer insights that would allow them to better serve their customers and fine-tune their platforms.

New Analytics Infrastructure in Record Time

After hearing InterWorks’ proposal, Fujifilm decided to pursue the entire revamp of their analytics infrastructure as proposed. At a foundational level, the process of transforming their source data and implementing Snowflake has completely streamlined their data pipeline while also giving them plenty of room to scale as needed.

Tableau and InterWorks delivered wonderfully built dashboards as advertised, giving Fujifilm a polished and modern way of visualising their data. Standard features across all their dashboards include visual KPIs, custom visual interface, flexible design and innovative user journeys with custom date selections. The following dashboards in particular gave Fujifilm deeper insights:

• Overview: Gives users a great idea about what they are printing and how much use they are getting out of the machine with respect to print, carriage, application, UV and ink categories.
  
• Maintenance: Shows clearer details on when and how printers need to be serviced.
  
• Performance: Helps users see how efficiently their machine is performing with time and metric comparisons, including up and down time, capacity limits and more.
  
• Internal: Sales and service dashboards allow internal departments to better understand how they’re performing across various areas of interest. (Internal dashboard views omitted for client privacy purposes.)

Beyond the insights from the dashboards themselves, Curator gave Fujifilm the perfect web-based portal to present their insights. The cost and time to produce something similar from scratch would have been considerable, but the InterWorks team set up Curator in a fraction of the cost and time. The biggest benefit of Curator, however, is that Fujifilm can extend their great dashboard experience to the surrounding UI and deliver insights securely to individual customers.

Building an entirely new analytics infrastructure historically takes a lot of time and money. The great thing about pursuing the Snowflake, Tableau and Curator stack is that Fujifilm was up and running in less than eight weeks with best-of-breed technology. This efficiency is certainly helped by Fujifilm’s bold and innovative vision, which holds true to their broader organizational values.

InterWorks’ expertise accelerated progress even further. The high-quality partnership between InterWorks and Fujifilm brought together a small team of experts that were highly available, flexible and reliable. Together, they were able to build exactly the remote diagnostics solution Fujifilm was after, unveiling new and exciting possibilities to help Fujifilm better market their innovative printers.

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