Posted by Noel Shannon on Tue, Aug 17, 2010 @ 10:20 AM
Performance management includes activities to ensure that goals are consistently being met in an effective and efficient manner. Performance management can focus on the performance of an organization, a department, employee, or even the processes to build a product or service, as well as many other areas.
The problem is that most organisations only pay lip service to Performance Management. That is to say that even if they have some form of Performance Management it is not widely known in the organisation and only a few people have access to it. In other words it is not transparent. In a survey of top businesses conducted by QlikTech in the UK it was found that only 12.7% had implemented a 'Transparent' Performance Management system.
The benefits of Performance Management are very well known and are particularly relevant in difficult times. Getting everone in the organisation involved in measuring the impact of decisions on the relevant metrics and seeing the effects immediately is clearly beneficial - it just needs decent tools to allow this to happen rapidly and without too much expenditure.
So how to get started - well one way might be to set up a cross sectional group say between Finance and Operations, decide on relevant metrics that can measure the impact of different decisions on the overall company performance, get the data and build a dashboard using QlikView then start monitoring performance on a daily basis as the data changes. This could be known as a Performance Managemant Hub.
A Performance Management Hub - also known as a Business Performance Hub (BPH) requires three fundamental ingredients:
1. A team of motivated, accountable people
2. An enabling technology which promotes accountability through visibility
3. And a fast, straightforward method of implementing improvement projects.
Gartner, QlikView, Accountancy Age and Financial Director are teaming up to deliver the latest thinking in Performance Management at an exclusive one-day event. The free presentation will enable selected leading organisations to unlock the productivity potential in their workforce and change behaviour by implementing a Business Performance Hub. Register now to attend this event.
Posted by Ray Malendewicz on Wed, Aug 04, 2010 @ 10:01 AM
From my last blog these are the reasons why a Business Intelligence project fails.
- There is no executive support.
- It is not easy to use.
There is poor IT support.
Let’s now look at why these Business Intelligence projects succeed. The obvious conclusion is that if you get Executive support, make it easy to use and give excellent IT support any Business Intelligence project will succeed.
In order to make sure that your Business Intelligence project is successful adhere to the following simple rules.
1st Rule to a Successful Business Intelligence Project : Make sure that you have complete and unconditional Executive support. You will get this when you can demonstrate that there is a viable and timely Return on Investment and that, when delivered, it will provide an easy to use solution.
2nd Rule to a Successful Business Intelligence Project : Have a strong project team. This team must make sure that they can provide a solution in a timely manner that is consistent and relevant to the users. The team must be able to respond to user specification without being continually diverted by changes.
3rd Rule to a Successful Business Intelligence Project : Make sure that the users can respond and react to the information produced. Users need to be able to understand the results and be able to take actions.
4th Rule to a Successful Business Intelligence Project : Choose the right tool and partner. This would appear to be the most obvious part of any Business Intelligence project but there are lots of tools available and while many of them look great some of them can be quite expensive. Don’t believe just what you read in articles and reviews by Gartner, Forrester and others. Do some real research and test the products for flexibility and ease of use if you can. Make sure that the Partner you choose understands not only the product but also what you are trying to achieve.
We at QlikPower have over many years experience in helping customers identify requirements and choose the right tool. We have worked with lots of Business Intelligence solutions but are currently most associated with QlikView. This is because we can demonstrate our solution against you own data and thus show its capability to meet your requirements.
Watch our video on QlikView's In-Memory Advantage or visit us at QlikPower to find out more.
Posted by Ray Malendewicz on Thu, Jul 22, 2010 @ 12:08 PM
I read many articles and blogs related to Business Intelligence. Very often they are quite technical but one issue comes up regularly. That is – ‘Why do Business Intelligence projects fail?’
There are many articles that have reviewed this aspect of Business Intelligence and dozens of lists that go into some details of why they fail. When I reviewed as many as I could read it was clear that though they provide lots of lists they all came down to a few key elements.
From these lists the top three are:-
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There is no Executive support. Many consider this to be the most important aspect of any Business Intelligence project. If there is not active board level support for all stages of the project it will not be successful. A member of the senior management team must take responsibility for the project and manage the overall project to its conclusion.
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It is not easy to use. Users are not properly trained and do not understand what is being presented to them. Often this means that they think the data is wrong and they do not trust the information being given to them.
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There is poor IT support. Users need to have a direct link to IT support to ensure that issues are quickly resolved. This means that IT must have knowledge of the solution provide as well as the capability of the product itself.
I am not saying that if you address the above issues you will have a successful project but I would hope that you will have more chance of your Business Intelligence project working.
We at QlikPower worked very closely with our customers to ensure that Business Intelligence projects are successful. To find out more please go to our web site.
So much for the glass being half empty, the next blog will review why Business Intelligence projects succeed – the glass will be half full.
Posted by Ray Malendewicz on Thu, Jul 15, 2010 @ 03:20 AM
So the World Cup is over and I suppose that we will have to get back to doing some real work instead of being the ultimate fan by looking at the World Cup Qlikview application.
I learnt quite a lot from this Business Intelligence application about the World Cup. For example I did not know that the Dutch East Indies appeared in the tournament. They did so in 1938. Actually more surprising is that it was still a Dutch colony then and did not gain independence, as Indonesia, until after the Second World War in 1949. Other useless information includes the fact that the majority of goals were scored with right foot shots and that the majority of teams, excluding England, had more midfield players booked than defenders. I guess the conclusion form this is that most players are right footed and that defence begins in midfield.
I am confident that, given some time, I can develop some completely useless Key Performance indicators that someone at the Football Association could latch on to and use as measures of real importance to the future of English football.
I am really looking forward to QlikView offering the next application. Hopefully we will not have to wait until the European Nations cup in two years before we are able to waste a few precious hours in finding some useless, but interesting, facts.
Anyway enough of this rubbish. Let’s get back to the real world. Yesterday I posted a blog about providing PDF reports
from QlikView. This has always been a problem but one that QlikPower has provided a neat solution. It will allow you to provide attractive reports without having to use Excel.
To find out more contact QlikPower through our web page and we can show you how it is done using your data.
Posted by Ray Malendewicz on Mon, Jul 12, 2010 @ 04:20 AM
QlikView has rich, flexible analytical capabilities, fast drill-down and appealing visualisation, but it is often easy to forget the people at the "sharp end" - the salesperson, the ops manager, the account manager - all of whom would love to have time to explore and analyse data, but who need a simple, electronic or paper-based report to work from.
It's surprising how many QlikView users still revert to the "export to Excel and email" option, when faced with distributing data to the front line.
QlikView has the ability to produce easy to use, fast, banded, automated reports is often forgotten during the development phase of the rather more exciting on-screen dashboard model.
QlikView offers a solution, giving its customers the power to automatically band and distribute PDF reports to pre-determined
lists of email recipients, at set times and days, allowing you to get the right information in front of the right people, in time for them to react.
Our solution is easy to implement, can be used with all your existing reports and models, expanding functionality without disruption to your day-to-day operations.
Download your free personalized QlikView Edition Now!
Posted by Noel Shannon on Thu, Jun 24, 2010 @ 05:50 AM
I attended a really excellent Sales Directors Forum last week
and it really woke me up to the demand out there in so many organisations for better data analysis. The organisers from
Treacy Consulting did a superb job in getting over 30 Sales Managers and Sales Directors from different organisations to meet to discuss the challenges facing them as we get through the recession. Among the topics discussed were their responses to the following questions
1. Do you expect a year on year increase in sales for 2010?
2. How has your sales headcount changed in the last 2 years?
3. What sales team headcount are you predicting for the next 12 months?
4. Does your company forecast an increase in bad debt provision/ collection for the next 12 months ?
In their responses to the questionnaire, which had been filled out in advance, the attendees had indicated that they were spending money on CRM systems (50%), Search Engine Optimisation (50%), and Blogging & Social Media (68%). But when the discussion started I was fascinated to note that many wanted better and faster data analysis to be made available to them for immediate decision making in so many different areas.
Value versus Volume
A large Drinks Manufacturer wanted better Key Performance Indicator (KPI) measurement to determine what product mix they should be promoting. He pointed out that in difficult times we need better data and data analysis so that we can understand how to grow value when we cannot grow volume. In order to do this we need to better understand the Promotional Mix and this is driven by Customer Insight. ‘Promotions that are not measured are a waste of money’ he said. Their product is the same drink but packaged and promoted in different ways. They have a large family pack, different size bottles and cans, different adverts and promotions and so on. There is obviously a different cost profile associated with the different product mixes and so the challenge is to better understand the value that can be extracted from promoting the optimal mix. This can only be done by constantly measuring the demand at a granular level and delivering this information accurately and in an intuitive way so that the decision makers can do a better job. For this to be done they would need better Key Performance Indicators and better data analysis.
Business Intelligence
QlikView is the Business Intelligence solution for this. Demand can be tracked over time – different outlets will have different social groupings and age profiles – these can be measured and mapped against the demand for the different products and for different time frames, even for different hours in the day. The Point of Sale system can deliver the information from all the outlets and this can be fed directly into
QlikView. Using its powerful associative software
QlikView can instantly analyse and show trends – and more importantly it can alert the user to unusual patterens and even predict future demand.
Posted by Ray Malendewicz on Wed, Jun 23, 2010 @ 04:48 AM
The objective of a Key Performance Indicator is to provide a tool to measure capability and, as a result of actions, improve the company.
Some while ago I worked for a software company that sold an application that included “Managerial Bench strength” as a Key Performance Indicator. It became quite a talking point because it created a lot of interest amongst our prospects and it sounded as if it could be valuable.
On the surface, this Key Performance Indicator appears to be related to the skills of a manager and if you carried out a Google search on it you would find that it is often used as a recruitment tool. In this case it is to identify skills and capabilities that are required in people you want to employ.
In fact the objective of this particular Key Performance indicator is to ensure that there are enough appropriately skilled people to move into managerial positions in the future. Its objective is to identify gaps in the future management of an organisation. It includes such measures as skill set, education and training undertaken amongst others. From this information it would be possible, using a Business Intelligence reporting tool to identify staff, who with appropriate training, could fill the gap.
As a talking point it was great as it would make people sit up and think that we really understood some key aspects of their business. As a Key Performance indicator it was rarely, if ever, used because it was too complicated to measure and rarely provided an indicator that was meaningful and could easily be measured.
This made me think of all the Key Performance indicators that are being used today. I am sure that some of you are suffering from over complicated measures that are very difficult to understand and make any improvements.
I would be really interested to hear from anyone suffering from too many or too complicated Key Performance Indicators. If I receive enough I will share them, without mentioning the organisation name, with you. I look forward to hearing from you.
If you would like to see some Key Performance Indicators and QlikView in action, try our World Cup App.
Posted by Ray Malendewicz on Tue, Jun 22, 2010 @ 05:32 AM
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.
Posted by Ray Malendewicz on Mon, Jun 21, 2010 @ 07:41 AM
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.
Want to see what QlikView can do? Why not try out our
World Cup App
Posted by Noel Shannon on Fri, Jun 18, 2010 @ 10:40 AM
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.