Enabled, empowered and inspired – advocating for QlikView
I want to thank all who shared good wishes for my move to QlikTech. I am thrilled to join such a dynamic company and user community. Naturally, many of you have asked me why I chose to work at QlikTech. I can tell you quite simply: their customers. QlikView customers lead the major trend in Business Intelligence: the move from enablement to empowerment.
When I first started in BI (or as we called it then, decision support) over 15 years ago, the first challenge was simply to enable informed decisions. Financial, sales and production systems hardly spoke to each other. I’m sure you know all this. Any decent BI software you buy today solves these problems: acquiring data, some slicing and dicing, presenting the results. You should settle for nothing less.
This enabling approach was not enough. It became clear that the dynamics of business users and IT teams differ too radically. Business users need, and demand, agility. IT can be bound by technical and procedural constraints. One approach to this dilemma is to empower business users to develop and share their own BI. This is where QlikView proves its potential.
Beyond empowerment
For sure, other BI solutions promise power to users. The industry’s megavendors, and some emerging players, offer tools that are more or less easy for business users. These tools can be analytically potent, too. QlikTech, however, does it better and has been doing it longer than any of them, since way back longer than 15 years ago. When most of us were only getting to grips with basic enablement, QlikTech was empowering.
QlikTech, then, leads this trend, and still leads in innovation. Moreover, QlikTech has marketed this technology and supported users compellingly. It is not by luck that QLIK was a leading tech IPO of 2010 in a down economy.
So: leadership, innovation and success. Is that why I am here? It’s not bad, is it? But wait, there’s more …
QlikView stands out for me, because it not only enables and empowers users; QlikView users are also inspired. This is, in a way, beyond our control. BI vendors and analysts cannot prescribe inspiration. Inspiration awakens when a user grasps a problem so clearly, and the potential of a technology so completely, that they can barely contain their enthusiasm to get to grips with them. QlikView’s ease-of-use, versatility, and unique associative experience, open up possibilities that only real business users (rarely technologists) can discover. I have seen this again and again with QlikView customers – and the inspired, in turn, are inspiring.
I’m a firestarter …
So, given QlikTech’s place leading this trend, what will I be doing in my role as QlikView Product Advocate? I think of my work as tracing the same pattern: enabling, empowering and inspiring.
The basic task is to help get the message out about QlikView’s power in analytics, mobile solutions, and collaboration. It’s a common theme that the business world is underserved with BI. I simply have to show more and more people that we can enable smarter decisions. So, expect to see me at many conferences, and seminars. For me, that is always fun.
Beyond this, I’ll work closely with customers to discover new ways in which QlikView empowers business users. This empowerment, after all, is QlikView’s core value. And for me, working deep in the weeds with customers is one of the things I enjoy most. From this work, I will take advice and insights back into the product team for future versions of QlikView.
Finally, I hope to be able to share some inspiration. There are remarkable people out there doing great things with QlikView. I’ll be searching out their stories. I’ll be trying to tease out how they make the breakthroughs they do. Then, I hope to share those insights and practices with others. Inspiration is a spark that can start fires. I’ll be fanning the flames.
This, then, is what brought me here to QlikTech. It’s a grand way to start the year.
Congratualations Donald.
We don’t get much in the way of earthquakes here in the UK, but I felt one when I read of your new career with QlikTech.
Your move will certainly make me think of QlikTech in a new light – as I’m sure it will for many others
WOW. I always said that if I were Microsoft, I would buy QlikTech even before Oracle, SAP, IBM made their move on Hyperion, BO and Cognos.
Oh well, while MS is trying to sell Excel as BI, real visionaries take over the BI market.
Well done, QlikTech!
Wow. Congrads. Please keep in touch I’ve got some BI activities in DC area that may be of interest to you.
Hi Donald,
Thanks for yet another informative post!
As a traditional DW/BI consultant I have always questioned how products like QlikView solve issues of Data Quality and MDM. Am i just missing something or is this just something QlikTech advocates conveniently fail to talk about
These concepts are of course of particular importance to larger organisations.
Also are you able to build advanced logic such as the scoping and hierarchy aware measures we can build with MDX in SSAS? (lets not talk about BISM.. ; ) )
I guess i am trying to work out which scenarios this kind of technology is really suited to.. seems like its a great product but perhaps not for everyone? More in the “personal BI” or “departmental BI realms? My limited knowledge of QlikView makes it appear similar to PowerPivot – along with the same limitations. i.e. problems caused by bad data, needing matching field types/formats to join on, granularity issues etc..
Would really appreciate your thoughts on this!
Thanks Bhavik. I’ll address some of the specific questions in later blog posts. In general, you ask “I guess i am trying to work out which scenarios this kind of technology is really suited to.. seems like its a great product but perhaps not for everyone?”
Here is an insight from colleague Erica Driver that I think captures the answer very well:
While QlikView can be (and very often is) used to answer the same kinds of “first” business questions that traditional BI software can answer (e.g., “Which regions were the best performers in 2010?”), it goes beyond traditional BI in that it enables users to ask and answer – on their own, without intervention from IT – the second and third questions. See this blog post and short video: The Insights You Can Glean in Just Five Clicks. QlikView provides an experience that allows users to answer questions themselves (not only the first question, but the second and third questions, as well) quickly and easily, without burdening IT with requests for a new report or query.
Where QlikView really shines is in business discovery. QlikView bridges the gap between traditional BI solutions (including data warehouses) and standalone office productivity applications, enabling users to forge new paths and make new discoveries. QlikView enables self-service BI, delivering a combination of five capabilities that make it unique in the market: user-centric interactivity, associative experience, access to business data―from anywhere, speed-of-thought analysis, and rapid time to value.
• User-centric interactivity. Ask your own questions and formulate your own insights in a simple and straightforward way. Google-like search lets users type any word or phrase, in any order, and get instant, associative results that illuminate new connections and relationships in data sourced from different systems. Visualize data in the way that makes the most sense to you. Take data and see it any way you want, including in attractive charts, tables, maps, and graphs in 2-D or 3-D. Zoom in, zoom out, and click anywhere for more detail. Remix and reassemble data in new views and create new visualizations for deeper understanding. See the related blog post and video: Boundless Visualization Options.
• Associative experience. Gain unexpected business insights by understanding how data is associated—and what data is not related. Conduct direct and indirect searches across all data anywhere in the application—globally or within a single field. Unlike traditional BI tools, when the QlikView user clicks on a data point in a field, no queries are fired. Instead, all the other fields instantaneously filter themselves based on the selection the user made. The user’s selections are highlighted in green. The datasets related to the user’s selection are highlighted in white, while unrelated data is highlighted in gray. See these related blog posts: Unpredictable Questions and the Power of Gray and As Easy as Your Favorite Consumer App.
• Access to business data—from anywhere. Easily access relevant information from multiple business systems with incremental loading of updates. Rapidly combine data from any source, including Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, SQL Server, MySQL, or Excel. Combine data from multiple systems in a single in-memory location to access a full range of detail from top-level indicators to mid-level trends to full transactional detail – in one comprehensive system. Leverage, but don’t require, a data warehouse. Access your analytics through the most popular mobile devices, including iPad, iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. Get unprecedented freedom from the desktop with dynamic, interactive data analysis when and where you need it. Get complete data selection, associative search, GPS-sensitive filtering, and advanced visualization.
• Speed-of-thought analysis. As the pace of business accelerates, the only acceptable lag is none at all. QlikView radically collapses time to insight with zero-wait, instantaneous results. Users simply call up data, ask questions, and receive answers — all on the fly, all on their own. Leverage a highly optimized, scalable, in-memory engine for instant access to very large data sets. Derive insight in just a few mouse clicks. Data visualization isn’t just about great charts and graphs—though QlikView provides those. Data visualization is about seeing relationships and finding meaning in data, and QlikView’s associative experience provides a quick path to insight.
• Rapid time to value. Measure time to value (or time to market, for partners) in weeks, days, or even hours. According to a 2009 IDC survey, 44% of QlikView customers deploy QlikView in less than one month and 77% deploy it in less than three months. In contrast, a typical traditional BI software implementation takes months or even years.
QlikView can also be used to answer different kinds of questions from those that traditional BI can answer:
• QlikView can be used for analysis sandboxes (see related blog posts here and here and here)
• Because QlikView is easy enough to use by even the most casual business user, it can provide business transparency, which can in turn lead to cultural change (see related blog posts here and here)
• QlikView supports a “build to think” approach to BI (see related blog posts here and here)
Thanks Donald,
i suppose thats the part i knew already. Look forward to future posts addressing the other MDM/Quality issues.
Best of luck with the new role
Congrats Donald.
All the bes, fun and innovation!
We’ll see you around.
Gertjan Vlug