BI4Impact: Business Intelligence for Employability-Oriented SEOs

Abstract

Abstract: Social Economy Organisations (SEOs) working in employability operate under growing pressure to document results, monitor beneficiary trajectories and demonstrate accountability to funders and partners. Yet many still rely on fragmented spreadsheets, paper files and informal recording practices, which weakens longitudinal follow-up and evidence-informed decision-making. This paper presents BI4Impact, a Business Intelligence (BI) prototype designed to support information management, indicator monitoring and reporting in SEOs delivering employability interventions. The study adopts an exploratory mixed-method design. First, an online survey mapped current information practices and perceived needs across 26 professionals from Portuguese SEOs. Second, five semi-structured interviews were conducted to identify operational bottlenecks, functional requirements and ethical concerns. Third, a preliminary validation of the prototype involved 20 potential users who assessed usability, perceived usefulness, priority functionalities and expected barriers to adoption after a guided demonstration. Findings reveal substantial data fragmentation: 61% of respondents rely on dispersed spreadsheets and 48% still combine digital records with paper-based files. At the same time, 91% expressed interest in a simple data-visualisation tool. Prototype validation showed high usability scores for navigation, visual clarity and information comprehensibility, as well as very high perceived usefulness. Participants prioritised dashboards with key indicators, automated reports for funders, structured registration of job placements and longitudinal follow-up features, while identifying the main adoption barriers as lack of implementation time, current data disorganisation and training needs. The paper contributes by documenting information-management constraints in employability-oriented SEOs, proposing a low-cost and ethics-aware BI architecture tailored to the social economy, and arguing that digital transformation in mission-driven organisations should be understood less as technological sophistication and more as organisational capacity-building for evidence use, accountability and learning. The study does not claim causal effects on employability outcomes; rather, it offers preliminary evidence on the relevance and feasibility of BI adoption in a socially oriented organisational setting.