The Outset

You feel it when you enter the door at Møntergade 19 at the Børsen Headquarters; this place has a rich history and tradition. However, even though Børsen has existed for more than 126 years, they are very modern when it comes to how their systems and how the IT organization supports the company’s purpose and goal:

“Børsen wants to support the “Competent Democracy” in Denmark via facts and credibility, and I have a vision that we should know even more about our business and our data so we can support the overall purpose even better.”

Building an IT Organization for the Future

With a clear focus and a common goal of maintaining simplicity and moving IT resources closer to the business, Mette and the team have succeeded in modernizing the IT organization, simplifying the IT landscape, and reducing the dependencies on specific resources ensuring that Børsen can continue to stay relevant to the readers the next 126 years.

“When I started at Børsen in 2018, we had a lot of ongoing IT projects involving all of our core systems being changed in parallel. Since we were missing a common end goal that tied them all together, we decided to start all over again, and in 2019 we started building a new data platform. The common denominator for all projects was simplifying the architecture and tools so that more people could use, understand, and discuss the data flow and output across the organization.

This was not an easy decision, but I have never believed in patch solutions; instead, I believe in doing it right even though it takes a longer time because this minimizes the amount of time and hence free resources to continuously improve our product. Another goal was that we didn’t want the systems to adapt to us, but we should adapt to the standard systems, which meant less customization and complexity.”

Solutions are not only about tech

An open dialogue and strong cohesive reasonings are essential factors in how Børsen makes decisions. Finding solutions to a problem should not only be about technology but how to strengthen the business as a whole. Mette, therefore, focuses more on the business mindset than the technical competencies when recruiting new employees:

“When hiring IT people, we seek colleagues that want to contribute to making a better product and understanding our business. We don’t create solutions because of new emerging technologies. No, we do it because it strengthens the overall business of Børsen.

The essence for us when it comes to recruitment and new solutions is that we keep the focus on lowering the complexity both in the actual tech stack but just as important in our communication across deferent functions. It is not difficult to make tech sound very complex; the hard part is making it understandable across so that we can take our tech decisions together and ensure that these decisions are an integrated part of our core business. It must never just be tech decisions but decisions that support the company and the bigger picture.”

Working towards fewer dependencies 

Simplifying the data landscape and systems has generated further benefits both in terms of the speed of onboarding new employees and also creating an organization where person dependency is decreasing by the day. 

“When we talk scalability and flexibility, it is both regarding people and technology. Since 2019 our team has grown substantially, and this has been easier because of our choices to lower the complexity and create a culture where data & tech are something we talk about across different departments. 

Just recently, we hired three new people who have had a smooth transition into the data team because of our setup. 

A personal goal for me is that I want to leave Børsen in a better place. I have no intentions of stopping now, but when I one day leave, I am aiming at making myself expendable so that organization and new people can easily take over and continue the development. Therefore, I work towards consistency, less dependency on few people, and specific technologies to have flexibility and scalability.” 

External advice should feel like an internal resource.

As part of the journey, Mette brought in Intellishore as external advisors and consultants on the new Data Platform project. For Mette, the key drivers behind the decision were the level of competencies, Intellishore’s tech-agnostic approach, and consultants with a business mindset – but more importantly, a consultancy firm focusing on making themselves expendable. 

“There is a fine line when taking in external help because you can lose ownership and business understanding. There is also the risk that some of your own people don’t develop like they otherwise would, and therefore we wanted a consultancy that had the same mindset as us and could function almost as an internal resource. Furthermore, we wanted someone that would make themselves expendable when the project ended, which we found in Intellishore.”

The aspiration for the future is to empower more people at Børsen

Focusing on simplicity has significantly reduced the number of steps from data to insights, enabling Børsen to make faster business decisions. Implementing a central data platform has further enabled Børsen to share its data with external partners in a secure manner. However, the journey is far from over, and Mette has great aspirations for the future, where she aims to empower more people at Børsen to utilize data in their work. 

“We have made some great advancements so far, but looking ahead, the goal is that we can get more transparency and greater connections between systems and departments (Finance, Editorial, and Commercial) to make better decisions. We have a project called “Data for Alle,” where we are working towards making data easily available at different levels, from the data analyst diving directly into the database to people wanting an overall dashboard to support the daily work. We must have the foundation that can give greater data empowerment to more colleagues at Børsen.”