Gamle Oslo boosts its ability to serve residents using Microsoft Fabric

Providing the best services to all residents

The core motivator of government in Norway is to offer the best society possible for its citizens, and that starts with offering services to help everyone living in the country. This is also true in Oslo, the country’s capital and one of the fastest growing cities in Europe. Management of the city is divided into 15 different districts, with Gamle Oslo (which roughly translates to “Old Oslo”) hosting some 60,000 permanent residents in addition to visitors, workers, and tourists.

Residents within Gamle Oslo need access to housing, employment, health care, and public services, and the duty of local   administration is to support residents according to their needs. But resources within the district aren’t infinite, so the administration needs to make sure its assistance is accurately distributed to those with the greatest need. Gamle Oslo was collecting plenty of data about social issues, employment, education, and job opportunities, using Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft Dataverse. But the district was running into trouble with pulling all these different data sets into a unified location.

Gamle Oslo needed to be more innovative to draw its existing data into one place and develop insights from that central repository. “Strengthening innovation is a core part of what we are doing,” says Aleksander Lorentzen, Head of Digitization for the district of Gamle Oslo. “It’s meant to be a transformative process, where digitalization is the means to the end goal of understanding what our citizens need and how best to serve them.”

Partnerships and data development

The public demo of Microsoft Fabric started around the same time that the district’s administration was trying to address the problem of unified data visibility. The city’s kindergarten services served as both an example of the issue and a chance to test improvements. “We realized that a kindergarten manager had to log in to 15 different systems to see relevant data for their job!” says Lorentzen. “We started experimenting with Fabric there, to have a unified platform.”

Gamle Oslo started building a single interface for kindergarten managers to log into that pulled data from all the different systems into one place. Instead of logging into multiple services, managers could immediately see details about attendance, financial data, and performance on a single interface. After receiving initial positive response on use of Fabric for a few datasets, Gamle Oslo continued to expand usage of Fabric, with an ambition of implementing it across the district.

Microsoft Fabric also allows the workers in Gamle Oslo to build within a low-code environment in ways that had previously seemed too time-consuming. It’s now possible to develop new tools and processes without needing a strong technical background. And since Fabric pulls data from the district’s existing sources, employees don’t have to wildly change their practices.

Greater data insight

Drawing connections is one of the most valuable parts of using Fabric for analysis and visibility. Gamle Oslo district can load up color-coded maps of the district showing where minor issues such as graffiti or broken streetlights are being reported. This can also be correlated with other data looking at income or employment within the area, which helps the district not just prioritize repairs of existing issues but also manage future strategic development of services.
 “We need to move beyond just what happened yesterday into predictive analysis for what is going to happen tomorrow,” says Lorentzen. “We need to be able to see all of the knowledge we possess and act on it for our residents.” Through outreach programs like speaking with youths in the area and tracking which areas within the district have higher incident reports over the past year, it’s easier to figure out how to best serve the community and direct resources.

Youth coordinators collect field information by using Microsoft Power Apps, as low-code development enables the district to easily create solutions that simplify employees’ everyday duties while generating new data. The data is infused into Fabric and combined with other sources, creating valuable insights.

A cited example of this valuable insight is related to organized youth activities within the district’s youth center. Once the youth center closed after events, planners could see there was a direct correlation between the youth center closing for the night and more incident reports in the area. “They didn’t have anywhere to go,” says Lorentzen. “They’re out, it’s nighttime, and they want to have fun!” So instead, the youth center stayed open for extended hours after the next event, and the incident reports went down accordingly.

A vision for future improvement

Gamle Oslo credits Ingraphic, a consulting partner located in Norway and recommended by Microsoft, as a major component of what has made the project successful. “Ingraphic is a small company here in Oslo, and they had a very high degree of competency with Fabric,” said Lorentzen. “They’ve helped us finetune everything in our integration and deployment, and we’re really happy to work with them.”

And there’s still more room for innovation; the district aims to use AI to make predictions and is also experimenting with Copilot Studio for further improvement and management.

From the point of view of residents, it’s unlikely that the majority know or even care that the district is using Microsoft Fabric, but they see the results in action. Residents see how Gamle Oslo is deploying its resources to solve problems quickly and efficiently. That means better lives for district residents and a better city for everyone. “Fabric makes analytics accessible to people without a technical background,” says Lorentzen. “It makes this data accessible, and it means that we have a stepping stone to adjust, redevelop, and improve our services for residents.”

Find out more about Gamle Oslo on Facebook and on LinkedIn.