WHY IT ORGANIZATIONS CAN T LIVE WITHOUT QLIKVIEW

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1 WHY IT ORGANIZATIONS CAN T LIVE WITHOUT QLIKVIEW A QlikView White Paper November 2012 qlikview.com

2 Table of Contents Unlocking The Value Within Your Data Warehouse 3 Champions to the Business Again: Controlled Self-Service to Relieve the Analysis Bottleneck 5 Discovery vs Standalone Visualization 8 It s Not Just for the Business: QlikView for IT 10 Why IT Organizations Can t Live Without QlikView 2

3 With QlikView, this was one of those rare instances I can honestly say that when we delivered this to the business we exceeded their expectations. They actually got more than they thought they were going to get. For an IT professional, that s very satisfying. CIO, Fortune 500 Pharmaceutical Company QlikView brings true benefits to IT groups, helping elevate their stature and importance across the organization by providing real value to the business. Whether yours is a small IT organization struggling to support the business under growing cost restrictions or a large IT organization challenged with being a closer partner to the business and providing Big Data analytics, QlikView enables IT groups to provide faster and more intelligent analytics for the business while taking advantage of existing investments. Unlocking The Value Within Your Data Warehouse In many organizations, large investments have been made to create centralized corporate data stores such as Enterprise Data Warehouses (EDW) and group datamarts. By centrally pulling data from an organization s myriad of transactional source systems, cleansed, approved gold standard data can be made available to support analytics-based decision making. The QlikView Business Discovery platform effectively complements an organization s data warehouse strategy. QlikView provides an associative visualization layer that sits right on top of your data warehouse to provide deep insight into your organization s data to support decision making. It can be used by IT groups and business units alike to help unlock the value hidden within your data warehouse. Front-end to a data warehouse. By using any combination of ODBC or custom connectors, QlikView can work with your data warehouse in one of two ways: 1. In-memory data analytics. QlikView loads data from a data warehouse (e.g. hourly or daily), compresses it up to 90% and makes it available for rapid in-memory visual and associative analytics. 2. Hybrid in-memory and direct data access. QlikView loads data in-memory as before, but can also be combined with direct access to the databases when data sizes become extremely large, for example as in a Big Data environment. Uniquely, the full associativity of the data elements is maintained, regardless of whether the data is stored in-memory or accessed directly. This provides a truly seamless data experience for the user. Why IT Organizations Can t Live Without QlikView 3

4 IT often faces challenges to support the business with data warehouses alone. Dynamic data. New sources of data are constantly being introduced and existing sources being updated, making the job of maintaining the data warehouse a challenging task. Immediate analytics. New discoveries and insights found by business functions are often the result of data sourced outside the data warehouse and need to be acted on immediately. Support backlog. Data warehouses can be slow to change: requests for new reports, new queries and new views from the business typically result in a large and growing backlog of requests from the business to IT. 1 Extending a data warehouse. Today s rapidly changing data reality means that business decisions are increasingly made by analyzing data that hasn t yet made it into the data warehouse. Ad-hoc departmental databases and spreadmarts, data sent from suppliers, customers and partners and even social media data are typically not captured in an EDW yet are used to make decisions. One of QlikView s core capabilities is the straightforward ability to extract data from multiple sources, model it and make it available for analytics. QlikView extends the value of a data warehouse by combining its data with data from non-centralized sources, giving the data more context and improving the insights found within the data. Figure 1: QlikView can front-end or extend a data warehouse Parallel Development. Enterprise Data Warehouse projects can take up to 2 years to complete, leaving IT and business functions alike very frustrated. Because QlikView is a rapid analytics development environment, it is used to deliver BI even while the data warehouse is under construction. Rather than wait 2 years, the EDW team can show fast wins to the business and gain further support for their project. QlikView can be used to deliver analytics at all stages of the project because QlikViews apps can be created with the source data and then the same UI can be used with EDW data once it is ready. IT can then understand how the data is being used and they can incorporate that knowledge into the DW. Why IT Organizations Can t Live Without QlikView 4

5 For over 26,000 customers worldwide, QlikView is enabling IT professionals to better serve the analytic needs of the business, delighting business users and making IT champions to the business once again. Figure 2: Parallel Development: Deliver BI even while building the data warehouse Champions to the Business Again: Controlled Self-Service to Relieve the Analysis Bottleneck The idea of Self Service BI isn t new: the traditional report-centric BI vendors have been trying to accommodate this demand for years. More broadly within IT, Self Service has become a new normal these days, with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) just one example of its proliferation and success. Within BI most especially with report-centric vendors - it has often fallen short of expectations because efforts to implement it have been narrow in scope and have required heavy maintenance from the very IT professionals whom they are trying to liberate. But it doesn t mean the demand has gone away and high performing organizations recognize the necessity to embrace Self Service BI in order to stay competitive. Why IT Organizations Can t Live Without QlikView 5

6 QlikView Business Discovery is inherently self-service 2, with a very important caveat: IT groups must be allowed to maintain discipline and control over core infrastructural elements whilst ensuring that the business units can benefit from the flexibility in analytics provided by QlikView. Figure 3: Self Service BI Maturity Levels Self Service Maturity Level Level 3 Self Centric POWER USERS Level 2 Hybrid IT BI GROUP POWER USERS Level 1 IT Centric IT BI GROUP Data Layer Creation In-Memory Data Model Built Analytics & User Interface Development User Acceptance & Testing Maintenance QlikView Development Stages Discipline at the Core. QlikView gives IT professionals strict control over who can view which data and who can access which applications. This is done by integrating with existing security infrastructure within your organization and by providing highly granular security within applications (row-level and field-level security) Liberating IT groups from mundane tasks. By providing a truly self-service BI environment, QlikView removes the burden on IT for providing all the analytics to the business, and makes it a provider of an analytics platform on which the business can conduct its own analytics. This frees up IT professionals to focus on higher value activities such as infrastructure, security and governance rather than simply writing and re-writing reports. Governance & Compliance. QlikView provides extensive logging and serverside management capabilities to help IT administrators manage their QlikView deployments. All licensing, user, application and data access tasks are managed via a single QlikView Management Console. Additionally, the QlikView Governance Dashboard gives a view into data lineage in a deployment and provides an impact analysis when data sources are changed or moved. Why IT Organizations Can t Live Without QlikView 6

7 Become a champion to the business once again. QlikView enables IT professionals to deliver far more analytics and BI to the business than with any other approach. With its rapid application development capability, requests from the business for new apps can be answered much more quickly, changes to existing applications made easily and with its self-service approach, business users can get answers to their own questions without turning back to IT for a new report. A single QlikView dashboard can replace many 10 s of standardized reports. This all contributes to the success of QlikView and makes IT groups who provide it to an organization true champions to the business. Figure 4: QlikView deployments provide rapid growth in analytics delivery without huge growth in IT developers 3 Why IT Organizations Can t Live Without QlikView 7

8 Discovery is about finding something unexpectedly during a search. Discoveries are found by answering unanticipated questions, not the same questions over and over again. QlikTech is the biggest vendor in the data discovery space. Gartner Emerging Technology Analysis Report, June 2011 Discovery vs Standalone Visualization A key trend in BI today is the move towards Discovery-enabling tools. As defined, Discovery is about finding something unexpectedly during a search. While many discoveries (either in science or business) are irrelevant and ultimately useless some are so groundbreaking in their significance as to make all other useless discoveries worth it. Visualizing data is just one element of discovery, but it s not the complete story. Discovery gives your business a competitive edge. In business, discovering that your company is selling more of a product in one region than another, or that on a given day of the week, at a particular time, the quality of product on the production line drops, or that when Product A is placed alongside Product B on your store shelves that both products sell more: all of these have an extremely valuable place in our professional lives. Figure 5: Data Visualization and Discovery with QlikView Why IT Organizations Can t Live Without QlikView 8

9 Visualization. Seeing your data is very important it is how we humans generally like to process information. Discovery goes beyond simple standalone visualization however: is permits a person to explore data freely, to ask many different questions repeatedly, to find hidden elements in your data that weren t part of the original search path, to be prompted to find new insights hidden in your data in plain sight. QlikView, uniquely, provides visual discovery. Failure of Traditional BI. Until recently, business software has failed in its attempt to facilitate the discovery process. This is because of the fundamental architectures that the traditional report-centric BI vendors were forced to build on. Constrained by disk-based and query-based architectures, the natural free-flowing exploration of data that might ultimately lead to discoveries is not permitted to occur. Very often, querybased technologies are a) too slow and b) technically difficult to master. Ultimately, BI became the provider of standardized reports which offered users a very limited data exploration experience. Figure 6: Associative models permit Discovery QlikView enables true Discovery. QlikView adopts a radically different approach to data access and analysis. The dramatic reduction of the cost of memory coupled with innovations such as associative data modeling and data exploration has given business users the ability to explore their data and make discoveries. QlikView provides an unrestricted approach to data discovery where business users can ask and answer their own questions, regardless of how the data has been structured further up the data chain. Answering one s own questions and exploring new questions is the essence of the discovery process. Why IT Organizations Can t Live Without QlikView 9

10 By using QlikView, IT professionals gain insights into their own operations: SLA Performance Analysis Network Traffic Optimization Root Cause Analysis License Utilization IT Asset Management It s Not Just for the Business: QlikView for IT In the same way that their counterparts in the business functions are challenged with making data-driven decisions easily and quickly, IT professionals are constantly under pressure to gain insights into their operations. Using QlikView, IT users can explore beyond standard operational dashboards to look into areas of concern where the answer is not immediately visible. This can facilitate root cause analysis for improved problem management without having to log into system management tools. Capacity modeling, transactional performance analysis, network traffic optimization and more can all be enhanced if there is no limitation to how IT data is discovered and used. IT gets performance and operational insight. QlikView improves the service that IT provides to the business by gaining deep operational insight. Most IT Management tools will provide dashboards that show performance metrics, but these are typically static or are difficult to adapt. With QlikView IT operational data can be pulled together rapidly. IT decision makers are not limited to reviewing the aggregated dashboard views and can explore without limitation. Figure 7: IT Asset Management Application Multiple systems. All forms of IT data - capacity, provisioning, monitoring, transaction performance, licensing, hardware - can be rapidly connected to deliver immediate visibility into key IT metrics. Why IT Organizations Can t Live Without QlikView 10

11 QlikView for QlikView. The QlikView Governance Dashboard is a great example of an IT operations application built using QlikView. Used by IT administrators, it provides a consolidated view of all the data flows moving out of source systems and into QlikView. Data lineage and impact analysis are just two of the insights that IT administrators gain into their QlikView deployments. Figure 8: QlikView Governance Dashboard Giving IT greater agility in working with the business. QlikView enables greater IT agility as decisions are faster and more reliable. Insights are shared with the business community to explore how IT can enhance service provision. Better collaboration and understanding is achieved between business and IT. In thousands of companies and organizations across the world, QlikView is helping to raise the importance and relevance of IT groups. By utilizing investments in Enterprise Data Warehouses, enabling true and controlled Self Service BI and by delivering highvalue discovery capabilities to the business, IT professionals are again seen as champions to the business once again and are increasingly seen as critical and indispensible - business partners. Why IT Organizations Can t Live Without QlikView 11

12 End Notes 1 According to a recent Aberdeen Group report, the average backlog of BI-related work in IT groups is 143 days. Aberdeen Group March 2011, Report on Agile BI 2 The Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI, 2011, stated that QlikTech is the poster child for a new end-user-driven approach to BI 3 Graphic taken from the Self Service BI Case Study: International AB. All rights reserved. QlikTech, QlikView, Qlik, Q, Simplifying Analysis for Everyone, Power of Simplicity, New Rules, The Uncontrollable Smile and other QlikTech products and services as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of QlikTech International AB. All other company names, products and services used herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The information published herein is subject to change without notice. This publication is for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and QlikTech shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to this publication. The only warranties for QlikTech products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting any additional warranty. Why IT Organizations Can t Live Without QlikView 12