By Philip Duplisey – Director Consulting Services
On the QlikView blog website, Erica Driver has summarized the results of a recent survey conducted by Aberdeen Group of QlikView users. Please read her post, but as a quick summary allow me to highlight her highlights. For me they represent a paradigm shift in business intelligence software use within organisations, and are a main driving factor behind the success of QlikView. Sometimes we get all excited about its advanced technology, the numerous patents QlikView holds for its in-memory associative data model, and forget that how it is used makes all the difference.
Here is Erica’s highlight list:
- Users have best-in-class forecast accuracy.
- Beats best-in-class in one-year, per-user cost of dashboards.
- Users’ dashboard initiatives are driven by needs of line of business managers.
- Supports rapid dashboard prototyping.
- Makes it easy to identify data sources.
- Enables users to identify KPIs independently of data sources.
These are truly remarkable statements. We are so used to hearing them from a salesman, or reading them on glossy marketing material, that we forget these are survey results from end users! What would your end users say about their Business Intelligence software?
At Bardess we are often confronted with high demand for QlikView from the business community, but find resistance from the IT organisation. As an IT guy, I have personally been on the other side of the fence many times, and had to defend “our turf”. The arguments at the time were “strategic direction”, and “integration” with existing investment in ERP platforms, in an effort to simplify and reduce costs. All sound reasons on the surface, but look at the list again, and a case can be made that each of these findings directly or indirectly lead to simplification and cost reduction.
Beyond that, these findings, reflect the direction most IT organisations are moving in. IT wants to have a” seat at the table” with business, and being seen by business to be a partner and not just a service provider. It doesn’t make sense anymore to have folks who love technology, and worked hard for their computer science degree to be adding another column to a report or formatting a system extract from the ERP system in excel every morning for consumption by the Sales VP. QlikView allows IT folks to partner with business by adding their deep understanding about their data, assist in building the business rules into the data model, and then allowing the users to gain valuable business insight through a self service capability.
About the Author
Philip Duplisey, Director of Consulting Services at Bardess, has been implementing enterprise wide solutions globally at Fortune 500 companies for 15 years. He enjoys enabling the organization to find value in their data, and presenting that data in compelling ways that lead to deeper insights and improved performance.
