Finance Monitor Provides Maximum Transparency at Ostbeligen

Gaining citizens’ trust is one of government’s main concerns. And a government that doesn’t have anything to hide can publish all of its financial information and decisions in order to achieve this goal. These are the thoughts of Oliver Paasch, Minister President of the German-speaking Community of Belgium, whose vision is to provide maximum transparency by publishing current budget figures. A business intelligence solution was used for this, the one that underlies the so-called Finance Monitor.

Where does tax money go? How high are current debts? What projects are financed with which budget items? And will these projects benefit citizens in the long run? In Eastern Belgium, people have been able to answer these questions with just a click since summer 2018, for the Finance Monitor has been live since then. Its purpose is to provide real-time insight into the community’s financial situation, at any time and from anywhere. The numerous crises of confidence of recent years, for example the financial crisis, have marked and damaged the culture of trust in Europe – with the Finance Monitor, the ministry provides a state-of-the-art instrument for restoring and securing this confidence. When logged into the citizen information portal ostbelgienlive.be, everyone has quick, easy access to current income, expenses, liabilities, debts, and account balances, planned investments and investments made, as well as infrastructure plans.

“The Minister President wanted to provide citizens with detailed insight into the ministry’s actions. With the Finance Monitor, this is possible to a depth never seen before,” says René Miribung, Speaker for Finance and Budget in the Ministry of the German-speaking Community. This way, for example, citizens can see how much is invested in health and social programs and how much of the available monies they get back. “The government doesn’t want to leave any questions unanswered here,” adds René Miribung. But the Financial Monitor can also respond to internal requests from the Parliament, for daily research about current budget figures can consume a lot of resources. The Finance Monitor should make government employees’ work much easier and give them some room to breathe.

The ministry issued the tender for the Finance Monitor across Europe in 2017 and received numerous applications. valantic also participated in the tender and knew that they would have to win the ministry over once again. “We were supposed to make a new proposal without reinventing the wheel,” says Jennifer Kell, responsible project manager and consultant at valantic. “For years, Cognos BI has been the ministry’s chosen reporting tool, and the dashboard we created provided the basis for the new online tool automatically – anything else would have been twice the work,” she explains, and adds: “It was clear to us from the start that we wanted to use the existing system. However, we had to think several steps ahead.” What should the Financial Monitor look like? How can we display the finances in appealing fashion? In what colors and with what design? To answer these questions, valantic consulted colleagues from marketing, sales, and consulting in order to be able to make a timely proposal. Then valantic sent an initial design for the dashboard to the Minister President – and got the job. “We were already familiar with valantic, as we had been working with them successfully for many years. Of course this also meant that valantic was familiar with our internal processes, something that plays an even larger role in a ministry than at a company,” explains René Miribung. He adds: “valantic’s concept won us over, as did the fact that they had extensive expertise from previous projects and had already proven to be a reliable, motivated partner.”

Behind the scenes, various systems came into play at the ministry: Employees enter and maintain their figures with ERP software. Overnight, an automatic ETL process runs, through which this data flows into a so-called dashboard, which integrates the graphics and reports into the Finance Monitor. Jennifer Kell emphasizes the security aspect of this process: “There may be no interruption on the line between the old and new systems. That required the integration of additional safety mechanisms – also in able to prevent unauthorized access to Cognos BI.”

Despite all of this, all the possibilities for publication were exploited, including travel expenses, fees, and the like, visible as a category so that you can see how much they were. Another challenges was the integration into the citizen information portal ostbelgienlive.be. For this, valantic worked closely with the website provider. “Currently, we are incorporating the Finance Monitor into the portal via iFrame, however we are already seeking an alternative since the display in some browsers causes problems,” explains Jennifer Kell. The ministry’s goal is that the Finance Monitor should be responsive and thus optimized for every solution and accessible in any browser.