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What is a Performance Management Hub?

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.

 

So How Do You Make a Business Intelligence Project Succeed?

From my last blog these are the reasons why a Business Intelligence project fails.

1. There is no executive support. 
2. It is not easy to use. 
3. 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.

Why QlikView is Right for You!

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!

England Needs Key Performance Indicators

So, after wiping away my tears after the terrible performance by England in the World Cup, perhaps now is the time to consider the Key Performance Indicators for the next England manager.  This, of course, assumes that Fabio Capello does the right thing and resigns.

I think that it is important to consider the Key Performance Indicators that should be set for the new manager.  Using the criteria that they should be quantifiable measurements, agreed to beforehand, that reflect the critical success factors of an organization and its objectives it is time that the Football Association come up with some useful KPIs.  From this they can then carry out some reasonable business analysis to measure the success or, more likely, the failure of the new manager.

The most obvious Key Performance Indicator should be results.  This is too simple unless it includes measure such as the quality of the opposition.  Thus a win against San Moreno is of less value than one against Spain.

More difficult, but just as important, will be the quality of the team.  This could include measures such as time of possession, passes completed and shots on goal.  It will mean that targets for improvements could be made for each measure.

Another Key Performance Indicator might be team selection and motivation.  This will be much more difficult to measure but could include player ratings.  It would mean that should a player receive a rating of say six or less out of ten then he would be considered either out of position or not fully motivated.

Analysing and reporting against these Key Performance indicators might help us get a better England manager or, at least, get rid of him before things get really bad.

We at QlikPower put a lot of thought into Key Performance indicators and the analysis required to report on them.  We work closely with our customers to produce Key Performance indicators which appropriate to their business.   Please contact us if you want to know more.

If you are still interested in the World Cup, though I can't think why, you can become a world master of football facts by looking at the instant tournament insight developed in Qlikview.

Kick it & Qlik it App - free!

What are the Key Performance Indicators for Robert Green?

 There are lots of jokes making the rounds about the terrible goalkeeping error by Robert Green in the match against the USA earlier this week.  The one I like most goes as follows:  Following the mistake he made in the USA game Robert Green spent today in goal practising saving shots.  He saved over 4,000 shots, from a player, without letting one into the net.  As a result of this success he, and Emile Heskey, will rejoin the rest of the team practise tomorrow.

Whilst it is a good joke it also made me think about what Key performance indicators we should be using.  For example for Green, should we be using number of shots saved or number of goals conceded as his key performance indicator.  Using the shots saved he may have done well especially as he made one good save.

For Heskey it may be a little more difficult as he was considered as having a good game on Saturday.  Using goals scored as his KPI he has a lot of improvement to make.  If, on the other hand, we use shots on goal as the key performance indicator he would score quite highly.  After all he only had a few chances.  His best one, when put through, was saved by the goalkeeper but at least it was accurate.  Using passing success as his Key performance indicator he will have done really well.  But after all he has been picked as a goal scorer.

What all this nonsense does show you, however, is that it is important to develop the most appropriate key performance indicators for your organisations.

We at QlikPower work closely with our customers to produce Key performance indicators appropriate to their business.

For a bit of fun you might want to go to check out our Kick it and Qlik it app and become a world master of football facts by looking at the instant tournament insight developed in Qlikview.

Leading healthcare provider implements QlikView

ThedaCare, the largest healthcare provider and employer in Northeast Wisconsin, has gained actionable insights into disease management, patient flows and financial management using QlikView. The deployment to 1,200 business and clinical users strengthens ThedaCare's commitment to employer plan purchasers and 225,000 patients served annually. As a data intensive business, the organization uses QlikView to analyze more than 110 million rows of data each day. ThedaCare recovered its entire investment in QlikView's analytics software prior to completing its full rollout this spring.

"QlikView dramatically reduces the time to answer business and clinical questions," said Brian Veara, ThedaCare's Manager of Decision Resources. "It is helping ThedaCare transition from standard static reporting to a truly analytical environment where any information can be rapidly accessed, analyzed and viewed exactly as needed. This capability is critical to fulfilling our mission to cost effectively improve the health of our community."

Using QlikView, clinicians now perform disease management analysis in seconds versus the hours, days and weeks they previously had to wait with traditional business intelligence tools. Executives and analysts can rapidly gain information for tracking, analyzing, forecasting, controlling and reporting financial and operational performance.

The new QlikView capabilities enable ThedaCare to explore data in its Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system and patient management systems as never before with more robust and flexible analytics applications. Examples include:

• Disease Management applications analyze the root causes for patient outcomes and KPIs for a wide variety of preventive care programs such as immunizations, disease screenings, LDL and blood pressure control, hypertension, anticoagulation medication management and tobacco cessation.
• Patient Care Benchmarks present aggregate information on how clinical teams and doctors perform and how patients respond to treatments
• Service Performance Metrics provide details on lab turnaround times, call center activity and appointment scheduling.
• Patient Flow Analysis to better understand and plan for how patients enter, use and exit the ThedaCare system. This not only helps the availability and delivery of care, but pinpoints need/risk/reward of expanding a facility, opening a new clinic or offering a new type of service.
• Financial Analysis, in addition to general ledger, AR aging and system-wide financial reporting, improves managing payer mix and physician volumes, negotiating contracts, and controlling expenses down to the cost center level.

ThedaCare will use QlikView to support its Lean Management practices throughout its organization. Planned projects include leveraging the new accessibility to its Electronic Medical Records system for creating decision-support innovations that will further improve healthcare value.

"Healthcare organizations spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to access and use information for decision support, revenue cycle management, evidence-based medicine, medical records management and supply chain management. The best way to improve care delivery and control costs is to streamline information processes, just like ThedaCare and hundreds of other healthcare providers worldwide are doing with QlikView," said Tim Wassman, President of QlikTech Americas.

ThedaCare chose QlikView when its data volumes outgrew existing reporting tools. To simply upgrade reporting based on traditional technology would have meant a considerable capital investment in software licenses and hardware, and would have continued burdens on IT staff. QlikView provided a more affordable path to simple and flexible access to information with little or no end user dependence on IT.

About ThedaCare

ThedaCare^TM is the largest healthcare provider and employer in Northeast Wisconsin with more than 5,400 employees at 43 sites, serving more than 225,000 unique patients in a 14-county area. The extensive ThedaCare community health system includes four hospitals, a primary care practice with 120 physicians at 23 sites, a 24-hour call service, comprehensive senior care (home health services, assisted living, skilled nursing facility, home hospice and residential hospice), customized healthcare solutions for area employers, joint ventures with other area healthcare providers and partnerships with area physicians.

QlikView partners with Human Inference to deliver Data Quality

Human Inference, the European leader in data quality solutions have partnered with QlikView to ensure customers have a proven platform to cleanse data for every business intelligence project in an organization.

With QlikView, customers can consolidate data from various sources to produce a single view for analysis.   Input of data from many sources can always constitute potential risks. Whether the data originates from CRM applications, financial applications, or other external data suppliers; there is usually a wide variety in content, format and the syntactic and semantic validity within these different data sources. Additionally, the data may be incomplete, inaccurate, outdated or otherwise divergent.  And there is always the danger of unintended double registrations. Human Inference establishes input control which enables users to check whether the intended input data already exists in a database. In addition, the input data will -if necessary- be corrected, completed and standardized.

"Our partnership with QlikTech offers great value to both our customers and partners," says Sabine Palinckx, CEO of Human Inference. "QlikView's analysis capabilities enable our customers to gain fast and clear insight in a variety of data sources. On the other hand, I definitely believe that a strong and intelligent data quality proposition is essential in BI. QlikView customers can benefit from our expertise and track record in this field. Trusted data is key."

QlikView's in-memory technology offers the fastest way to gain insight from data trapped in back end systems because it frees users from the traditional disk-based BI requirement of long, costly data integration projects.  QlikView provides access to all your data sources:  operational applications such as Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com; databases such as SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle underlying custom applications; data in traditional disk-based BI warehouses and cubes; data behind web services; and local data such as spreadsheets.

"The integrity of the data that goes into a QlikView application affects the accuracy and usefulness of the resulting analysis." said Anthony Deighton, Senior Vice President of Products, QlikTech. "We encourage customers to take advantage of the Human Inference solution, which is based on natural language processing and contains the core knowledge and interpretation to provide the best quality data possible.  We want the simplicity and ease of the QlikView experience to start at the point when users are putting data into the system so they will be delighted with the trusted results it delivers."

About QlikPower 

QlikPower is the leading QlikView Business Intelligence Solutions Partner for the UK and Ireland market.

We provide QlikView Licences and Support at the most competitive prices and a top quality Professional Services team to deliver the best value consultancy training and support.      Qlik here to contact us now

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?