QlikPower's Blog

Are Your Key Performance Indicators Right for You?

 

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. 

 

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.

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?

NOAD for QlikView

NOAD for QlikView!  Recently announced, QlikView has formed a new partnership with NOAD, a leading provider of high-performance, enterprise platform management software for BI applications. The announcement states that NOAD's "EQM product suite provides customers with solutions to cost effectively control change management, automate and monitor business intelligence life cycle processes, conserve resources and control costs on an enterprise scale". This is great news as the existing Qlikview product suite does not lend itself to easily managing change, especially in a multi-developer environment. Tracking changes with ease has always been on my Qlikview wish list. Although the press release does not refer to it, I am hoping that NOAD for QlikView product will contain a module for merging versions of Qlikview documents. From a development perspective there are not many weaknesses to be found in the existing Qlikview suite but the absence of a merge facility has been an inconvenience for my colleagues and I over the years.

This partnership is an excellent move for Qliktech as NOAD for QlikView will also provide complete transparency of the BI life cycle. With ever increasing regulation, Qliktech now have an offering that enables blue chip organizations to remain compliant on an enterprise scale. BI projects and processes can be defined, controlled, monitored and audited through all phases and the deployment facility will assist in alleviating security concerns. Surely such additions to the Qlikview suite can only strengthen the phenomenal growth of the product. All the more reason to understand how much your business intelligence tool is costing you and understand how in-memory technology has found its way to the front of the line with business intelligence products.  I wait in anticipation for the release of Qlikview 10 and cannot wait to see the latest batch of new features and functionality. Previous new releases of Qlikview have always invigorated my passion for the product and I am sure that NOAD for Qlikview and QlikView 10 will follow suit.

To learn more about in-memory technology and how much your business intelligence software is costing you, join this free webinar.

Register here: http://www.qlikpower.com/how-much-is-your-business-intelligence-tool-costing-you

Darren Kerfoot - Senior BI Consultant with Qlikpower

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?