What’s the first step in building a data warehouse or a business intelligence system?  Defining the key performance indicators (KPIs), right?  Wrong!  KPIs are certainly great to know and can definitely apply when you’re developing BI applications like management dashboards.  But, BI is NOT about management dashboards or data warehouses or query and reporting or QlikView or Business Objects…

Business intelligence is simply about capitalizing on data that was captured for other purposes.

I was struck by this thought over the Thanksgiving holiday when speaking to my brother in law.  He’s an executive with an up-and-coming, private-equity-financed distributor.  One night, his CEO had an epiphany

We know what people buy but we don’t know if what people buy is generally correlated with other things that they buy, or should buy.  If we knew this, we could encourage folks buying one thing to also purchase its natural accompaniment.

For those of us who have been in the BI business for long enough, this is a take on the classic ‘beer and diapers’ data mining example (click here for more on this BI ‘fable’).

This is certainly a use of BI, of capitalizing on data assets but it doesn’t really work in the way that folks expect BI to work:

• It doesn’t really start with a definition of KPIs
• While it may use a data mining tool, it doesn’t use dashboards or query tools or other, common, reporting tools
• It may use a data warehouse but it may, also, just use data assembled for a one-time analysis

In any case, when thinking about BI, the vast majority of companies need to stop thinking about BI.  BI is not the point.  Doing something extraordinary is the point and, if using data assets gets you to extraordinary, then BI is the mechanism.

It’s a great feeling helping a client understand their data and working with them to analyze it to get to an ‘a-ha’ moment.  Since Dataspace’s founding 15 years ago, our leaders have seen pretty much every technology that helps us help our clients.  And until recently, our CEO would comment, “they’re all pretty much the same.”  Well, he’s got a different set of talking points now.

You may have seen a few of our posts on the merits of QlikView, and now I’m proud to announce we’re Michigan’s newest QlikView partner.  Let me tell you why I’m excited.  Trite as it sounds, QlikView really is different.  Well, maybe it’s not QlikView that’s different, maybe it’s that using QlikView is a completely different experience than using other leading BI tools.  I’m not talking about features, technical architecture,  enterprise deployability or things like that – I’m talking about how, at the most basic level, using QlikView is different, and here’s how I sum it up: QlikView allows analyses that follow the way your brain thinks, not the way the data is organized.

With traditional tools you get some data, format it a certain way, and then use some kind of analysis and reporting tool to view it different ways.  If you find that you missed something, you need to go back and get more data.  If you find you have the right data, but it’s not formatted so the tool is optimized, you need to reformat it.  All this means that to use the tool, the user must bow to the data.  It makes free-thinking difficult, because if you find you want to look at the data a new way, you need to jump through hoops to get the tool to do what you want it to.  Even worse, if you need to rely on IT to reextract and reorganize the data every time you want another analysis, good luck making friends with them.

With QlikView and its database structure, you load all the data at once.  You don’t have to create cubes or other views on which to perform your reporting and analyses – QlikView’s application lets you drill down, up, sideways, it doesn’t matter – it’s all there from the start.  So, if you’re investigating which products are most profitable, and realize it would be great to see which customers buy those products, with one click they’re identified.  Want to see which products one of those customers buys?  One click to reset the products and one click to select the customer, and all the information updates again.  No more cubes, no more incremental fetches, no more bowing to the way the data is structured, no more IT SOWs.

Let your BI tool help you uncover the facts as your brain dictates.  Give QlikView a once-over.  Contact us if you’d like to discuss further.

If you check out the message boards and recent Gartner Magic Quadrants you’ll see that QlikView is the next hot thing in business intelligence. Some of our clients are using the tool and they are ecstatic. Applications are created far faster than with traditional BI tools and executive users eat it up. I can’t think of many other BI implementations where executives are eager to get on the computer.

In a stodgy BI space that is plagued by incremental upgrades and poor customer support, QlikView is BI’s battle of Midway – a point of inflection that changes the game. If you haven’t seen the tool, I urge you to check it out at www.qlikview.com. Run the demos, they give a good idea of what it can do.

So, what’s so good about QlikView? Well, once you see the tool in action you realize that it’s not about producing the next generation of pretty green bar reports. It is about giving users easy tools for rapidly slicing through data. The difference between QlikView and traditional BI tools can be summed up as follows: Traditional BI tools are for people who need reports, QlikView is for people who need answers.

In future posts I’ll talk more about what’s so great about the tool, about how it crushes the traditional BI – DW development methodology, why most companies will still need a data warehouse and why, in the end, QlikView is complementary to, not a replacement for, current BI technologies.

Want more info before then? Drop me a line at btaub@dataspace.com.