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Key Performance Indicators, Driving you to Success

Love them or loathe them Key performance indicators drive your life whether you are in a private or public organisation.  You can’t manage anything unless you “measure it” and “what gets measured gets done”, these are just two of the justifications for developing key performance indicators.  The objective of producing Key Performance indicators is to give you the information to allow you to make better decisions. 

In theory, Key Performance Indicators provide a series of measures against which you can judge success or failure.  They are intended to be quantifiable measurements, agreed to beforehand, that reflect the critical success factors of an organization and their objective is to reduce the complex nature of an organisation to a small number of key measures. In practice, unless developed to improve the organisation, Key Performance Indicators can be a rod for your back. Too many Key Performance Indicators have no specific and achievable measures and they simply create more work without benefiting the organisation.

When you decide which Key Performance Indicators to use, it is important to use factors that are key to the organization reaching its goals. It is also important to keep the number of Key Performance Indicators small just to keep everyone's attention focused on achieving them. You should also define the Key Performance Indicators and keep them consistent from year to year.  In addition you will need to set agreed and achievable targets for them.  

Key Performance Indicators can, and should, be used by all parts of the organisation. They should be used to as indicators from which the necessary actions to rectify problems or resolve issues can be taken.

At QlikPower we have been able to spend more time with our customers developing appropriate Key performance indicators because we use QlikView as our Business Intelligence tool of choice.  By not building a data warehouse we can spend more time working with a company to identifying and implement the key performance indicators they will use.  

See how QlikView and Key performance indicators work with our new World Cup App. 

 

The Importance of Business Intelligence Reporting

 

My last blog talked about the changes that I have seen in the use of Business intelligence tools.  I thought that perhaps this one could discuss the importance of Business Intelligence reporting.

Business Intelligence reporting is a subject that has created a lot of interest, many comments and many BI solutions. There are numerous groups and web sites that discuss the subject in great detail.  Even searching the Daily Mirror produces the odd result for Business Intelligence.  Sadly no such results can be found in The Sun so you will have to find another excuse to look at page three.

Business Intelligence is important because it enables users to make decisions that affect how an organisation is run.

Forbes tells us that many companies are turning to business intelligence to help them to get a better understanding of the Key Performance indicators that drive their business.

A recent report by Accenture suggests that high performing companies are more analytical than lower performing businesses. They are more likely to have business intelligence capabilities, business intelligence reporting, and data that is integrated and analysed across the business rather than in silos.

But, for most Business Intelligence tools, the cost and time involved in implementing a Business Intelligence solution is prohibitive.  In fact many consulting organisations advise you to start slowly and then build up.  This, however, can prove to be difficult because there is often a need to build a data warehouse.  As it would be inefficient and expensive to continually add to a data warehouse these tend to be built before users can take advantage of Business Intelligence reporting.

At QlikPower we have found that one of the advantages offered by Qlikview is that, as a data warehouse is not required, data from the whole business can be analysed.  As importantly it allows you to start slowly and then build up.  You will quickly be able to gain the benefits of Business Intelligence reporting without the huge cost of developing a data warehouse.  

In-Memory Analytics Gives The Edge

Instant analysis, greater insight, and rapid delployments are the main benefits of in-memory analytics.  It used to be the case that there were only a small number of business intelligence users in an organisation, and these people were happy to get a weekly report. Not any more - with modern tools, such as In-Memory Analytics that take advantage of the huge advances in technology, you can spread decision making throughout the organisation and you don't have to spend large quantities of money or involve your IT staff in developing complex reports. The pace of business now demands fast access to information and easy analysis; if the tools aren't fast and easy, business intelligence will continue to have modest impact, primarily with experts who have no alternative but to wait for an answer to a slow query.  In-memory analytics promises to deliver decision insight with the agility that businesses demand. It's a win for business users who gain self-service analysis capabilities, and for IT departments which can spend far less time on query analysis, cube building, aggregate table design, and other time consuming performance-tuning tasks. Some even claim that in-memory technology eliminates the need for a data warehouse and all the cost and complexity that entails. Business users have long complained about slow query responses. If managers have to wait hours or even just a few minutes to gain insights to inform decisions, they're not likely to adopt a BI tool, nor will front-line workers who may only have time for gut-feel decision-making. Instead they'll leave the querying to the few BI power users, who will struggle to keep up with demand while scarcely tapping the potential for insight. In many cases, users never ask the real business questions and instead learn to navigate slow BI environments by reformulating their crucial questions into smaller queries with barely acceptable performance. For example, the Austin, Texas, fire department serves over 740,000 residents and responds to more than 200 calls a day. The department recently deployed QlikTech's QlikView to better analyze call response times, staffing levels and financial data. QlikView is an in-memory analytic application vendor that has been growing rapidly in the last few years. With QlikView, users can get to data in new ways and perform what-if analysis, which the department says has helped in contract negotiations.

 

Benefits of QlikView go well beyond the fire department. "Unless we spend more efficiently, costs for safety services will take a larger share of tax dollars, making budgets less available for services such as libraries and parks," says Elizabeth Gray, a systems supervisor. Gray says that attendance and payroll data come from different systems and never seemed to make the priority list in the central data warehouse. "With QlikView, we can access multiple data sources, we can control transformations and business logic in the QlikView script and easily create a presentation layer that users love."

In many cases, In-Memory products such as QlikView have been deployed at the departmental level, because central IT has been too slow to respond to specific business requirements. A centralized data warehouse that has to accommodate an enterprise's diverse requirements can have a longer time-to-value. Demand for In-Memory is also strong among smaller companies that lack the resources or expertise to build a data warehouse; these products offer an ideal alternative to older BI tools because they can analyze vast quantities of data in memory and are a simpler faster alternative to relational data marts. 

To see more on how QlikView works, check out our World Cup App.

Free QlikView World Cup Application

QlikView has developed a FREE World Cup application so that soccer fans can enjoy discovering how Business Intelligence is great for discovering hidden facts and statistics really quickly from all the available data on World Cup performances.

Known as Kick IT and Qlik IT, this application gives World Cup fans a quick and easy way to discover unique facts and access comprehensive football data. Find historical data as far back as 1930, to as recent as the past hour of world football action. Analysis can be done by Year, Country, Player, Major World Tournament, or by dozens of other dimensions - like ‘'does player age equate to more wins''. Grow your football IQ! Qlik to see the fascinating facts and figures you can find in this World Football Fan App. Get the app now by going to http://www.qlikpower.com/kick-it-qlik-it/

QlikPower is the leading Professional Services and Implementation Partner for QlikView, the fastest growing Business Intelligence product in the world.

Why QlikView In-Memory wins over OLAP Technology

So why choose QlikView in-memory software over your traditional business intelligence tools? Let’s first talk about all the confusion. After many acquisitions and mergers in recent times such as SAP, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, you now have a choice of multiple disparate solutions without any insight into the future of these products.

However if you did decide to purchase one of the many OLAP-based solutions over an in-memory product like QlikView, which one do you choose? Lets take SAP Business Objects for example. Do a search on Business Objects Intelligence Solutions and you will find SAP B.O. Voyager, Set Analysis, Predictive Workbench, XCelcius, Desktop Intelligence, Dashboard Buidlder, and many many more. Are you required to purchase the B.O. Enterprise XI platform as well?

If you have simple Ad Hoc analytical requirements, all you require is a simple solution. Select a product that does what it says with a simple pricing model. In-Memory software is the answer for many reasons. Many of the solutions owned by these large business intelligence vendors are OLAP based solutions. OLAP engines can be very limiting:

• Creating OLAP cubes is an iterative process that takes considerable time, requires specialist skills and involves significant cost. Consequently it’s often restricted to Sales and Finance only. Surely other department have important data too. Just try adding another data source.
• Cube builds often take many hours and are usually built overnight or at the weekend, so real time reporting is not possible. Can you really afford to wait?
• Business user requests to create alternative drilldown paths or change hierarchies must be referred to I.T. and seldom are prioritised, leading to frustration and low expectations
• The staff originally trained have moved on so innovation is scant, resulting in a ‘it’s not broken so don’t fix it’ mentality So what’s the solution?

Learn more about the limitations of OLAP-based solutions, how business had changed, and what the advantages are of selecting QlikView in-memory business intelligence tool. Join our free webcast on How much is your business intelligence software costing you?

Join QlikPower in How much is your business intelligence software costing you?

QlikView In-Memory Business Intelligence Moves in on Cognos PowerPlay

QlikView in-memory business intelligence has moved in on Cognos PowerPlay like the iPhone has moved in on the old brick mobile phones with attached antennas.  PowerPlay was one of the world's leading OLAP based analysis tools. However, it was also originally developed back in 1990.  For old technology it functioned, but new needs and higher demands were developed, similar to the evolution of mobile phones.   QlikView in-memory was created out of these demands. As businesses changed, as requirements increased, and data became more complex, technology improved to meet these needs.  Unbelievably PowerPlay is still being used by some organisations today; so why the ‘perceived' loyalty?

As a former Cognos partner, I know of many reasons:

• A large economic investment was probably made in the product originally
• It took a long time to implement and ‘bed down' the original solution and there is no appetite to go through that pain again. Upgrades are difficult enough.
• The traditional Cognos rivals like Business Objects, SAS, Hyperion and Microsoft all have similar offerings using the same OLAP based technology, so why switch horses!

But the software does have its limitations:

• Creating OLAP cubes is an iterative process that takes considerable time, requires specialist skills and involves significant cost. Consequently it's often restricted to Sales and Finance only. Surely other department have important data too. Just try adding another data source.
• Unlike in-memory business intelligence, cube builds often take many hours and are usually built overnight or at the weekend, so real time reporting is not possible. Can you really afford to wait?
• Business user requests to create alternative drilldown paths or change hierarchies must be referred to I.T. and seldom are prioritised, leading to frustration and low expectations
• The staff originally trained have moved on so innovation is scant, resulting in a ‘it's not broken so don't fix it' mentality

In-memory business intelligence gives you the flexibility and ease of use technology to analyze your data when and how you need it.  To better understand the challenges of businesses today, and how decision-making and data analysis has changed since the purchase of your business intelligence tool register for "how much is your business intelligence tool costing" you and learn how you can fix the current issues that your company may be challenged with today.

Register Here:  How Much is Your Business Intelligence Tool Costing You?

10 Reasons Business People Love QlikView

10 Reasons Business People Love QlikView
And why we think you should check it out.

1.    You don’t have to be a guru to be a power user, so there’s less reliance on IT to generate reports. A business person proficient with Excel or Access will quickly become competent whereas a good SQL programmer will quickly become a development guru.
2.    BI gurus love it too, read this post
3.    Analysts speak highly of it.  Read IDC, Aberdeen and BARC.
4.    2,000,000 users…96% customer satisfaction rating*
5.    Customers make movies about us, check it out
6.    44% deploy QlikView in 1 month or less…77% deploy inside of 3 months*
7.    Nobody ever got fired for recommending QlikView (we’re the only BI vendor offering a risk-free, 30-day money-back guarantee)
8.    We’re the only BI vendor delivering immediate value with payback measured in days or weeks (198 on average*, to be precise), rather than months, years – or not at all
9.    TCO 53% lower than those other solutions… 34% increase in productivity*
10.    You can play with the developer’s version FREE… Click here (or Qlik)

*IDC/QlikTech Joint Survey - Click here (or Qlik)

One more thing, QlikView often sits comfortably with other BI solutions, so don’t worry if you already have SAP, Oracle or some other BI tool.

A quality product needs a quality partner and with our impressive track record, we believe that QlikPower fits that bill.

Should you wish to evaluate QlikView or have any additional questions we’d be delighted to help you.

Try B4 U BI - when buying BI tools - Seeing is Believing!

They say that a picture paints a thousand words but sometimes it doesn't tell the whole story - ''some paint was spilled'' doesn't really capture the scenario adequately.

Really - 'Seeing is Believing! 

'Seeing is Believing' makes sense from a business standpoint also when purchasing a new software application. What am I going to get for my investment? I'd like to see the benefits quickly and without cost to me. It is good business practice to keep tight control of spending and to minimise costs, but traditional business intelligence (BI) systems make it very hard to follow this rule.

To date, the major cost of implementing Business Intelligence solutions has been the large up-front expense of buying the requisite technology and expertise. Also BI is often underpinned by a data warehouse that can store, recover and analyse the data needed. This is both time consuming and costly. What is needed is a step by step approach where each step has an easily proven Return on Investment (ROI).

BI should be one of the easiest IT costs to justify, as it can return dividends on any investment. To overcome firms' wariness, business users need to "try before they buy". This offers a way of ensuring that a BI project can earn its keep while avoiding the large up-front costs often involved.

 

These scenarios sound familiar? 

Fed up of watching meaningless pre-configured demonstrations on irrelevant data! 

It's very difficult to compare any new offering to my existing in-house solution 

Don't have time to evaluate multiple offerings! Might be able to spare a few hours, maybe a day.

Want to see why BI is relevant to my business BEFORE I buy the application. 

 

QlikPower, is a dedicated QlikView Partner focused on helping our customers realise the full potential of QlikView, that is why we give a free Trial together with free Professional Services to get your first application up and running

Click here to sign up for your free trial