The verdict is in – people everywhere are embracing technology to enrich and simplify their lives. Most of the time we think about this trend pertaining to activities people engage in outside of the workplace. In recent years, however, we are hearing more and more about “Consumerization” – the growing tendency for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market and then spread into business and government organizations. The emergence of consumer markets as the primary driver of information technology innovation is seen as a major IT industry shift, as large business and government organizations dominated the early decades of computer usage and development.
I don’t know about you, but I find this trend to be very exciting! Why? Because the primary impact of consumerization is that it forces businesses of all sizes to rethink the way they procure and manage IT equipment and services. In other words, your voice, the voice of an empowered knowledge worker in our “information economy”, is becoming more and more important when it comes to the technology provided in the workplace – the tools needed to do your job.
Forward-thinking executives recognize this. A recent article In CIO Magazine on the topic notes the following: “Today, business users are very savvy. They know what they want and what they need. They expect technology to be easy and intuitive, as simple as what they see on their iPad or iPhone.” Indeed, instead of providing company-owned hardware, many organizations have adopted a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) approach, allowing employees to connect personally-owned devices to access privileged company resources.
Why do we care about this at Bardess? Because even more exciting (for us, at least) is that Gartner sees this trend expanding into Business Intelligence (BI). “BI users want to be able to just pick up and use the technology — they don’t want to read the manual. Reconsider your BI vendor standards in the light of consumerization and evaluate the use of a model led by BI capability, rather than the vendor.”
That’s just one more reason we love QlikView. Along with other industry thought leaders, we recognize its leadership in the areas of innovation, visual analysis and agility. I recently witnessed this first hand while developing a global real estate dashboard for a well-known financial services client. We were literally swimming in data – locations, annual cost, square feet, occupancy, vacancy, headcount…. How to best display it all? WHY NOT A MAP! Everyone uses online mapping solutions these days. They’re familiar, intuitive, and easy to use. So we decided to make consumerization work for us. We combined the familiarity of Google Maps with the agility of QlikView – it was the perfect combination that empowered us to quickly plot this company’s rich, extensive property data onto a highly visual, interactive dashboard. The client was ecstatic – “people have never looked at the data like this. And because it’s a map, they already know how to use it.”
Are you interested in learning more about how Bardess can make QlikView work for your business? Contact us today for a free consultation.
