Dimensional Insight is primarily known for helping healthcare organizations, goods and services, and manufacturing companies here in the United States. However, we also work in some other interesting and unique industries, thanks to our network of global distributors.
Tweet: Spotlight on our distributors: meet Jens Rundquist of Infotool
Today, we introduce you to Jens Rundquist. Jens is a Sales Consultant at Infotool, our partner and Diver distributor in Sweden. I recently had a conversation with Jens to learn how Infotool is using business intelligence to impact various industries in Sweden, including education.
Jens, tell me a little bit about Infotool.
Infotool is a privately held company founded in 1987. We operate in four countries: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. We have offices in Stockholm, Halmstad, and Östersund, Sweden; Copenhagen, Denmark; Oslo, Norway; and Espoo, Finland. There are 26 people total in the Nordics.
Our focus is business intelligence with the Diver Platform and budget and forecasting with our own system – Infotool Budget and Forecasting.
In Sweden, we have several hundred customers ranging from small to really large companies.
Infotool has been top ranked as a business solution provider by customers and by Radar, the leading IT research company in the Nordics for four years in a row. I would say this is because we have excellent support, we are very dedicated to helping our customers, and we work with the Diver Platform.
What is your position at Infotool, and what do you do in that role?
I work with sales with both existing and new customers. I’m also responsible for Infotool’s initiative to work with customers in the higher education sector. In addition, I mainly work with customers in the public sector, like county councils providing healthcare and municipalities.
How are some of your education customers using Diver in innovative ways?
Our university customers use Diver together with Infotool Budget and Forecasting. This works very well as you can analyze a budget/forecast future projections when a process has started. For example, universities can identify a seasonal variation in costs and apply that to a future cost projection.
Another popular way to use Diver is for researchers to follow how much money they have left to spend in their projects. To support this report, they create dynamic project groups containing both activities and members involved in the project.
What aspect of Diver is most appealing to you, and why?
The flexibility and rapidity in developing solutions is an aspect of Diver that is most appealing to me. I think it’s interesting that you can solve almost every problem a customer comes up with in a very cost-effective manner. The beauty of Diver is that data is immediately accessible, without the need to build a portal to display data first. With the Diver model, you can directly see if you have enough dimensions for the organization to use and deal with quality problems. It is easy and fast to improve the model iteratively. When it is time to build the portal, you know that the data and dimensions will be perfect. You could say that with the model, we build a really solid foundation to the house before we build the rest.
In what direction do you see the future of business intelligence heading?
The future of BI will focus on ease of use and very graphically appealing solutions with a high level of self-service. I think Dimensional Insight’s DiveTab is very promising. This is because it includes data, documents, videos, presentations, and input of data both on-line and off-line.
In your estimation, how does Europe compare to the United States in terms of business intelligence sophistication?
I would say that Europe and the United States are equally sophisticated regarding business intelligence. In both markets, there are customers that do more with BI than others. Those customers tend to spend more in terms of both time and money. In addition, they have very creative and driving BI managers.
Tell us about the culture of the Sweden office.
There are 18 people, myself included, in the Sweden office, located in Stockholm. We have a very friendly atmosphere, and you will get help when you need it from any of your colleagues. It’s a great working environment. There is a lack of hierarchy in the organization, which people would find surprising. Also, our CEO Per Nyberg almost always has time for his employees.
- Understanding Wineries’ Top 3 IT Priorities - September 18, 2018
- 3 Skills Tomorrow’s Distributor Executives Need to Know - August 29, 2018
- Dimensional Insight Book Club: Why We Sleep - August 23, 2018
