WHY IT ORGANIZATIONS
CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT QLIKVIEW
A QlikView White Paper
November 2012
qlikview.com
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
QlikView, this
“ With
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
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.
• 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
• 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
© 2012 QlikTech
• 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
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
© 2012 QlikTech
“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
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.
Self Service Maturity Level
Figure 3: Self Service BI Maturity Levels
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
© 2012 QlikTech
• 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
• 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
© 2012 QlikTech
Why IT Organizations Can’t Live Without QlikView | 7
Discovery is about finding
something unexpectedly
during a search. Discoveries
are found by answering
unanticipated questions, not
the same questions over and
over again.
is the biggest
“ QlikTech
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
© 2012 QlikTech
Why IT Organizations Can’t Live Without QlikView | 8
• 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
© 2012 QlikTech
• 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
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
© 2012 QlikTech
• 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
• 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
© 2012 QlikTech
• 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
End Notes
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
1
2
The Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI, 2011, stated that “QlikTech is the poster child for a new end-user-driven
approach to BI”
Graphic taken from the Self Service BI Case Study: http://www.qlikview.com/us/explore/resources/
3
© 2012 QlikTech International AB. All rights reserved. QlikTech, QlikView, Qlik, Q, Simplifying Analysis for Everyone, Power of Simplicity, New Rules, The Uncontrollable Smile and
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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
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be construed as constituting any additional warranty.
Why IT Organizations Can’t Live Without QlikView | 12