Before the summer holidays, we had a conversation with Aage Husa, Head of Service Development and Collaboration at IKT Nordhordland (IKTNH).

IKTNH is a municipal collaboration owned by several municipalities in Vestland County. The partnership began under Osterøy municipality in 2011 and has now grown to include 12 municipalities in the region.

IKTNH provides IT services for the municipalities of Alver, Aurland, Austevoll, Austrheim, Fedje, Gulen, Masfjorden, Modalen, Osterøy, Samnanger, Sveio, and Vaksdal.

With its 26 employees, IKTNH focuses on sharing resources and offering standardized solutions to the municipalities. They provide secure, stable, and reliable IT operations, as well as user support for the municipalities’ employees. IKTNH also collaborates closely with its sister organization Digitalization and Innovation (DI) in the Nordhordland region.

The choice of Bsure

IKTNH became interested in Bsure after a presentation at the Public World conference in the fall of 2023.

Subsequently, the product was presented and demonstrated to several people at IKTNH and DI. What particularly sparked their interest was the insight the tool provided into license usage and the value this insight would bring during the upcoming license renewal.

“We wanted to use the tool to give better control to the municipalities so they could focus more on the services they offer,” says Aage Husa.

The municipalities gained better control over their users

The individual municipalities are responsible for determining which employees should have various licenses. IKTNH now uses Bsure Insights to generate reports that help the municipalities address discrepancies.

“It has helped us clean up the licenses. We found users who had left long ago but still had active licenses. Our municipalities now have better control over who has access to what,” Aage explains.

For example, groups of employees in the municipalities were registered with a code in the HR system that the IAM system automatically used to assign licenses. However, it turned out that these groups were not actually using the licenses as intended.

“Now we can easily highlight what is not being used and the associated costs, and then it’s up to the municipalities to decide what to do with that information,” Aage continues.

Looking ahead, IKTNH plans to use the data and insights they gain from Bsure Insights to further automate reporting and user management:

“We’re getting better data now. We want to build automatic reports that the municipalities can use.”

Benefits

Alongside the implementation of Bsure Insights, IKTNH upgraded their licenses to a higher (and more expensive) security level. After this license renewal, it was expected that licensing costs would increase for all the municipalities.

“The municipalities that took the time to clean up and optimize managed to maintain the same cost level as before, even with the upgraded licenses,” Aage notes.

The insights and reports from Bsure Insights enabled the municipalities to tidy up their user base and optimize their license usage.

“It’s important for us to be efficient and use our resources wisely,” Aage concludes.