Belgium Department of Agriculture and Fisheries nurtures environmental insights

Challenge

The Department wanted to gather and present the most up-to-date information on the local environment for the benefit of the public. However, it lacked a flexible tool to share and visualize information on its website, so local policy decision-makers were unable to efficiently access it.

The department needed a single platform to collaborate on data from local farmers, fisheries, and researchers. This included the types of fruits grown in various areas and environmental effects on local fishing. Internal, self-service access to a capable platform would allow those in the field to report their efforts and findings on the whole area. Additionally, the department wanted this information on its website so the public had access to it in real time.

Originally, all kinds of geographical and environmental information was manually gathered, transformed, and posted to the website, but the process was slow and resulted in continually outdated information. The Department wanted to shift its culture so environmental policy decisions were based on data rather than on intuition. The team turned to TIBCO.

Transformation

The Department of Agriculture and Fisheries chose the TIBCO Spotfire analytics platform as its main solution. Spotfire analytics enables user-friendly, automated access to diverse indicators and data filters. The interactive visualizations (like treemaps, geocharts, and pie charts) allow many options for exploring and discovering data, such as the number of forage crops compared to vegetables grown in Ghent.

Spotfire software also allows the department to improve processes and generate deeper insights into its data. With real-time information, the department is regarded as the authority and now publishes frequent reports on the Flanders area.

Most importantly, the department can provide farmers with data insights to support the success of their businesses—and policymakers can be provided with key environmental data for the best public policy to support Flanders’ agriculture.

Benefits

TIBCO's visual analytics platform provides a more streamlined, userfriendly experience by offering users a range of self-service data reports. The platform allows access to all stakeholders involved (employees, journalists, researchers, and farmers) so knowledge of the data is more widespread, making communication among the parties stronger and more efficient than ever before.

This open-access platform has increased wide-scale use of data across the department for daily decisions to long-term research. Around 50,000 users are generating a wide variety of data, which is further analyzed and visualized with Spotfire software. This means 50,000 farmers, fishers, researchers, and environmentalists are using the platform to report information on weather patterns, types of livestock, or farm acreage and output.

Jan Jacobs, head of the IT Standards Department, Architecture and Security, says "Integrating Spotfire software with the website is one of the key elements that confirms the Department as the authority for the agriculture and fishery industry in Flanders."

With the Spotfire solution, all data manipulations are automated and result in interactive visualizations. Employees no longer have to manually input information, allowing more time for providing statistics, data, and visualizations. This data-driven change, from manual data labor to automated data success, means anyone can have access to the state of agriculture and fishing in Flanders.