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As a part of their summer studies in the Information & Technology Program (ITP) at the School of Business, a team of students designed a user-centric dashboard for the Bank of Finland IT department and its clients. The team consisted of Information and Service Management student Max Puttonen, Landscape Architecture student Sera Remes and Management and International Business student Laura Auhto. Within ITP, the three had chosen to major in Strategy & Experience Design (SED) to learn about tools that can be used as a basis for user-centric design thinking.

The Bank of Finland IT department now sees the status of all their client systems and devices in a single view. This is made possible by a student-designed dashboard that compiles all of the most essential information in one place. The dashboard facilitates the work of IT experts and brings transparency.

Solution developed by students will be implemented in reality

According to Miika Syrjänen, Head of the IT services management office at the Bank of Finland, the Bank is very satisfied with the project and that the students were very fast in internalising things and taking command of them.

‘Service design thinking brought a cross-disciplinary viewpoint different from what we are accustomed to. The outcome of the project fulfilled all of the requirements set. The final report shows visual and artistic merit’, says Syrjänen.

‘Next, we will proceed to implement the solution in-house using a method that is not so typical of us: we are about to arrange a two-day hackathon with 12 of our experts volunteering from different backgrounds. They will use novel technologies to implement the dashboard designed by the students. This dash shows the tip of the iceberg, so here at the Bank of Finland, we will also have to review our internal projects and think about new and better ways of implementation’, Syrjänen continues.

The students enjoyed collaboration with the Bank of Finland’s professionals and were happy to see that the bank staff were eager to hop on the project. There were some challenges in the beginning but these were tackled through active communication.

‘We were truly able to seek a solution together with the users, not isolated from them. The best feedback to our team is that people at the Bank were very excited about our solution and that they will proceed with the project on the basis of our work’, the students say.

‘The ITP gave us an opportunity to learn from each other, and our backgrounds were mutually complementary. The business project brought concreteness to the courses in the study program, and it was nice that contributing to the project played a central role also during the classroom sessions.’

The Information & Technology Program or ITP is a minor study module arranged in Aalto University School of Business during the summer. Its students have three months to develop solution concepts to challenges faced by businesses in different sectors. The program belongs É«É«À²â€™s spearhead teaching projects, and the Program Director is Laura Sivula.

More information about this project:

miika.syrjanen@bof.fi
Bank of Finland contact

laura.auhto@aalto.fi
Student team contact