How FIEG went from 50 to 250 licensed users in one year
The planning team at Sesi and Senai in Goiás had already built the dashboards the organization needed, and adoption jumped once the information started arriving organized, with control over who sees what and with a design project built on top of the strategic view.
Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil
The client
FIEG operates in Goiás through Sesi and Senai, and the person responsible for planning, information and data across both entities is Maristela Nunes, planning manager with nearly eighteen years at the organization, alongside Plínio Bernardes, data intelligence coordinator, who has known the system from the inside since his internship six years ago.
The team is small and works with occasional consulting support, and one of its traits explains a good deal of the result that came later, because, as Maristela makes a point of recording, it is not a team of data scientists or BI specialists, but of people who learned to build data analysis by doing it, one idea a day, in constant exchange with each other.
The starting point
FIEG adopted Qlik in 2016 with fifty licences, moved across everything that existed in its previous BI tool, and has been developing new projects continuously ever since. The problem was not in building the dashboards, which the team had mastered, but in what happened after them. Distribution went through an intranet portal, reachable only by the internal audience, assembled from objects the team picked one by one and rearranged in an order different from the one in the original application, which met the basic need to get information out without satisfying anyone, because the visual result was not what they wanted, there were practical limits such as the impossibility of downloading the data to Excel, and the entry path itself required the user to choose between Sesi and Senai before seeing anything, which broke the experience of anyone who needed both.
There was also a mismatch of vocabulary the team describes precisely. Whoever develops talks about apps, folders, sheets and reports, and the business user recognizes none of those terms, so handing them an application with thirteen sheets amounts to asking them to open one after another until they find the number they are looking for. Some of those sheets existed precisely to answer recurring internal requests or to serve specific meetings, and therefore had to stay available to the team without being exposed to everyone.
On top of that, the organization held genuinely sensitive information, especially from human resources, where the definition of who can see what comes from the business area itself and admits no approximation.
What was rolled out
NewHub came in as the consumption layer on top of the Qlik environment FIEG already maintained, and the first change was one of organization, with groups and subgroups arranged by theme, so that a subject such as production gathers underneath it what exists for Sesi and for Senai, and the user reaches the dashboard by a path that matches the way they think about their own work. Inside each dashboard the list of sheets sits beside the content, working as a menu, and the team chooses which of those sheets stay visible, which is what solved the case of the application with thirteen sheets by exposing only two to the end user, the general analysis and the analysis by area, without deleting anything and keeping the rest reachable by whoever administers and whoever works in the original application.
The menu is dynamic, and that is the part that settled the question of sensitive information, because a user without access to a given dashboard simply doesn't see that item in the navigation, and the team can release a set of human resources information to three people named by the area's own management while keeping other dashboards open to the whole organization.
In a second stage, foreseen from the initial understanding of the context, Cluster developed a bespoke design project for the strategic view, bringing into a single interface the indicators of the strategic map, the management efficiency programme and Senai's performance targets. The project went through research into the specific needs, prototyping in a design tool with explicit decisions about spacing, contrast, alignment, information architecture and the type of visualization suited to each indicator, and only then the web implementation that connected the data. The resulting architecture keeps the layers separate, because every set of information shown on the final screen has its equivalent built in Qlik, which means the FIEG team changes a calculation rule in the environment they already master and the change shows up in the consumption layer without requiring parallel maintenance.
Delivering the annual indicators took around fifty days, and the monthly tracking project followed.
