Learn how to unlock the power of your data with interactive, business dashboards: Live QlikView webinar, September 14, 1 p.m. Eastern
US-Analytics presents a live webinar on QlikView dashboards that unlock the power of your data so you can quickly answer your business-critical questions – as easily as a Google search.
When searching for an answer, often the first place you turn is to Google. When searching for business answers, time and again you’re faced with wearisome spreadsheets. A new study by CITO Research details interactive, data analysis tools that provide a new, easy way to access business-critical information: QlikView.
Sign up for the September 14 Webinar & Learn about QlikView
A national business intelligence consulting firm, US-Analytics, will host a live webinar, Tuesday, September 14 at 1 p.m. Eastern that will discuss QlikView and its applications for easy, slice and dice and ‘what-if’ analysis for all users, not just IT.
Presenter Scott Magnuson will review QlikView’s point-and-click dashboards, and the technology’s ability to provide a single, visual view of multiple data sources thanks to the QlikView’s in-memory technology.
Sign up for the free webinar and receive a complimentary download of the CITO Research whitepaper, Dashboards as Easy to Use as Google.
Can I really replace a data warehouse with…nothing?
By Scott M. Sr. Account Manager
I’ve been talking to a number of clients these days that are curious about the common QlikView claim that no data warehouse is needed to use it right out of the box, even if you’re wanting to look at information pulled from multiple transactional systems, web services, flat files, Excel spreadsheets, etc. They’re mostly curious because they’re used to hearing “oh, you want Business Intelligence, so first you should build a data warehouse.” Or they’re curious (and skeptical) because they know how untidy data usually is coming from these types of systems, and one of the main functions of a data warehouse is to tidy data up (and then there’s aggregation, data marts, indexing, cube-building, defining drill-down paths, etc.).
Here’s the interesting reality. You don’t need a data warehouse. And you do. And sometimes something in the middle works just fine. How can this be? Well, simply because…it depends.
Scores of companies have avoided building a data warehouse (for the purpose of supporting their BI initiative) by implementing QlikView. Scores of companies have used QlikView as the information delivery part of their existing data warehouse architecture. Scores of companies have decided that even with QlikView they need to stage data in a relational database and build a dimensional data model. Each of these scenarios and resulting architectures is the result of that situation’s business and technological requirements.
So no answer is universal – your mileage can and usually will vary. This is partly because of the unexpected (for many) ways that QlikView eliminates a lot of the complexity in the underlying data structure normally necessary to build BI. But QlikView simplicity can’t always negate the needs of Master Data Management or data governance, for example, which may in the end dictate an architecture which addresses those needs. But sometimes it can.
You may find that you can avoid building a data warehouse with QlikView. Or you may find you can replace yours with QlikView. Or you might find that while there’s no avoiding a data warehouse, there are ways for it to be constructed in a fraction of the time and deliver value very quickly to the business.
The answer for you and your situation is in the subtlety between what you need and what is possible. Even in the IT world, there’s a lot more grey out there in a world you might assume is black and white, especially when new paradigms collide with old ones.
After all these years, why isn’t Essbase presumed to be a part of every company’s analytical technology strategy?
Jon R., Director of Consulting
There are only 3 movies that have ever made me laugh so hard that I started to cry. You know the kind of laughter that you can’t stop. It’s so involuntary. The first one was Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And it happened more than once. Mind you, I was only 12 when I first saw it. The second one was There’s Something about Mary, and you might be able to guess the scene. The last one: Groundhog Day.
If you haven’t seen any of these movies, you’re definitely missing out on some comedic genius in each of them. And to spare any of you unfamiliar with the Groundhog Day movie from a long synopsis, the basic premise is that the lead character, played by Bill Murray, gets stuck in a loop, re-living the same day over and over again.
Has anyone also had the feeling that they were trapped in life’s equivalent of an infinite do loop? If not, God bless you. I think I’m in one right now. In all honesty, I’ve been stuck in one for many years.
As a multidimensional dude long before Essbase was a product, as an early adopter customer of Essbase in 1993, and as a very early employee of Arbor Software (maker of Essbase) in 1994, I didn’t presume that everyone was going to ”get it“ overnight. But, after all these years, why isn’t Essbase presumed to be a part of every company’s analytical technology strategy, and as ubiquitous as water? Why doesn’t it get implemented with every Data Warehouse, BI, or EPM project?
Don’t get me wrong, Essbase is all over the place. And sometimes it’s been running in the same old, poorly-designed-but-still-useful state for years. It’s just that it could be helping so many more people. I have been in prospective accounts in the past month alone that run the gamut of: (a) never heard of Essbase; (b) heard of it, don’t use it; (c) use it in Finance only still; (d) use it, running version 6.5 still; (e) use BSO, have 50gb, 30 hour calcs; (f) use BSO Essbase and wonder what ASO means; (g) use it and think that optimization comes from a book, a web board, an hourglass outline design, caches, etc.; (h) think that ASO is very limited; and every other dated Essbase paradigm you can imagine.
My goodness do people need some fresh, new education on what Essbase can do for them, and is doing for other companies today. Essbase, when delivered by real experts, can:
- Reduce the cycle time of their core business processes
- Improve the quality and complexity of their analyses
- Support 360-degree management of their business
- Provide richer types of analyses, scaling much larger data sets
- Deliver rapid, high ROI, high business impact solutions
I’m hopeful that Oracle’s renewed interest in selling Essbase to everyone, with the continued leadership of my old friend at Hyperion, Robert Gersten; and the continued success of our firm and others in delivering loads of Essbase application-based solutions, will produce a day when I can walk into every meeting with an existing or prospective client to hear them say,
“Jon, we have a complex, analytical business problem, and we need your help to solve it with Essbase”. Ahhh.
Truth be known, although that’s been a great desire of mine dating back to my days of running the Essbase business unit for Hyperion, when that day arrives, there won’t be enough talented people to solve the complex problems. More about that in a future posting.
For now, let’s just tease it as being part of the systemic inertia of organizational and human behavior.
With no ill will towards the incredibly strategic big brother of Essbase database technology (the relational database), let’s be clear about a few Essbase things…
- This Johnny-come-lately notion of user self-service and enablement never met a better product technology than Essbase
- The closest thing to the end of spreadsheet hell for millions of users is Essbase
- Yes, every single company, institution, and organization on Earth would benefit from Essbase deployed as a strategic technology
My father once told me that disappointment stems from the gap between reality and expectation. While my Essbase disappointment has been long-lived, it will come to an end, and my team at US-Analytics will continue to play a part in that reality.
Creating Your Shortlist – Criteria For Selecting a Business Intelligence, Reporting and Analysis Solution
By Scott M. Senior Account Manager
The choices available to companies looking to add business intelligence, reporting and analysis to their operations can be overwhelming. There are literally hundreds of product offerings to choose from: a Google search for “business intelligence software” will yield more than 290,000 responses! Further, most of the products in the Business Intelligence field are technically similar. Throw in technical jargon and marketingspeak and making relevant differentiations becomes quite difficult.
To cut through the clutter and streamline their decision-making process, most companies build a short list of preferred vendors based on some set of criteria, and then invite those short-listed companies to compete for their business. Often this involves an elaborate RFI process, with extensive spreadsheet-based checklists where different products are compared across potentially hundreds of attributes and factors. These processes tend to favor larger vendors – those with product scope necessary to achieve a check in the “yes” box for the m
ost features. This type of process also tends to favor complex products – as those products are most likely to have the most features.
Needless to say, a long list of checked boxes contributes little toward understanding the benefits and complications created by using a particular product. The typical RFI process often produces an extremely homogenous short list – “winners” that all clump together with look-alike features and attributes.
So how to choose? Companies can both simplify and greatly improve the quality of their short-list selection process by taking a different approach – rather than creating a master list of all possible features and then checking off feature after feature in an attempt to “keep score,” companies should focus on the business value and ongoing expenses that different solutions create – measured across a few key variables.
This article is intended to outline key criteria that companies should consider when creating their shortlists – and making their ultimate selections.
Speed of Implementation for the Whole Solution – Analytics Applications To the Desktop
Just as product marketers talk about delivering the “whole product” rather than just a piece of the overall technology, companies should look at the time required to implement a complete working solution – one that makes it possible for business users to answer business questions. There are two measures to watch here: Time until the first application is deployed to an end-user, and total deployment time for the entire project.
According to a survey by DM Review and IDC, only 5% of companies were able to deploy a usable, working analytics application within 1 month – and the average time to first application deployment was 5 months. More than a quarter of the companies surveyed took more than 6 months to deploy a single working application, and the average time to completion for projects was 17 months – just shy of 1 ½ years.
Many of the BI solutions available today are “infrastructure heavy” with extensive pre-application deployment work paving the way to the actual end-user products. Companies should be aware of the timelines that their BI vendors require when they make their selections, and how those timelines match up with their expectations and requirements for the project. During vendor evaluation, companies should be sure to include at least one vendor with a track record of delivering rapid deployments (3 months or less, start to finish) so that they can weigh the benefits and tradeoffs in their evaluation process.
Key Metrics:
1. How long does it take to deploy the first analytics application?
2. What is the average or typical total project deployment time for this product?
Flexibility – Are We Building With Cement or Something a Little More Pliable?
There’s an old saw about ERP software: “It’s just like cement – you can pour it to look like anything you want, but once it dries, you’re stuck with it.”
Many of today’s business intelligence solutions involve extensive infrastructure projects – building rigid data warehouses and small armies of OLAP hyper-cubes over a period of several months – with actual applications reaching the end-users only at the very end of the project.
While these implementations can provide real business value, their success depends on a clear understanding of the business drivers and requirements at the beginning of the project. Unfortunately, analytical design tends to be an iterative process. For companies where the business changes rapidly or where no clear analysis program has been in place before, the ability to modify analytics applications quickly after they have been deployed will have a significant impact on the project’s success. The same survey mentioned above found that 75% of all analytics applications needed to be modified within 6 months of their initial deployment. Companies should look at their business intelligence system as a living, changing set of applications – and consider the time and cost required for making changes to existing applications as a critical element of their evaluation.
Key Metrics:
1. After an application is deployed, how long does it take to add a completely new data source to the application?
2. Once a new analysis area is identified, how long does it take to prototype and deploy a completely new finished production application?
Ease of Use – Can Our Employees Learn to Use It?
Your company can build the most powerful, sophisticated business intelligence system in the world. But if no one in the company uses it because it is too complicated to figure out, the system will be worthless. Ease-of-use takes two forms – for the IT department that maintains and modifies BI applications, and for the end-users who actually use the applications. Both have a significant impact on the long-term success of your business intelligence initiative. Despite this, ease-of-use is often overlooked during the business intelligence selection process. Perhaps because it is an attribute that is difficult to measure (check yes or no – does this product have “ease-of-use” in it?) the standard checklist RFI process rarely even attempts to address this issue.
Companies need to consider what it will take for their employees to use the systems they deploy.
Key Metrics:
1. How long would it take the typical line of business manager to learn to use this product? Measure in hours, days, or weeks.
2. How many days of training do other customers using this product recommend for end-users? For IT staff?
3. How long would it take a power user from our company – either IT or business analyst – to learn to develop new applications with this tool?
By addressing these three factors – speed of implementation, flexibility, and ease of use – during the RFI process, companies can significantly improve the quality of their business analytics and reporting product selections.
Ten things you should know about QlikView 10
By Kristen A. QlikView Developer
QlikTech, makers of QlikView, recently announced the public beta release of the latest version of their business intelligence reporting and analysis tool. Scheduled for this summer, with the full release this autumn, a lot is going into QlikView 10 with list boxes and metadata. New features like improved object movement and new charts like the Mekko will bring a lot to the table as well.
Here are some highlights:
1. Container object. A new object enabling multiple objects in one area with a tab menu to toggle – a nice substitute to creating list box menus. Users can easily switch between a pie chart of different categories in sales to a bar chart displaying sales over years.
Container Object
2. Mekko chart. This chart analyzes multiple data series against two variables. One variable, the width of the columns, is proportional to data represented by the columns. The other variable is the individual segment height; it is a percentage of the respective bar total value. This chart is great for strategy and marketing.
Mekko Chart
3. Moving an object without a caption. Before version 10, if an object didn’t have a caption in order to move it you would either need to go into the caption properties and move the object by x and y position or add the caption, move it, and hide the caption. Now when the ALT button is pressed and the curser is over the object it can be moved. This just makes it a lot easier when the user wants to drag object quickly.
4. Field tags. Users can add system and custom meta-tags to fields. The tags can be viewed in the table viewer with the hover tool-tip. In the future, the tags will be used for intelligent sorting.
5. Expression comments. Chart expressions now have a place for comments. This allows the user to add more documentation on what they are doing in that expression.
Expression Comments
6. Current selections. Users can now add a dropdown to fields in the current selections box. This allows fast changes for selections.
Current Selections
7. Linked objects. It is now possible for several sheet objects to share a common set of properties. When two or more objects are linked they share all properties with the exception of size, position, and display state. When a user changes the properties of one object the change is reflected in the linked objects. The objects just need to share the same objectID.
Linked Objects
8. List box expressions. Before version 10, list boxes could only display frequency of that item, but now they can show any number calculated in the expression. The expression is the same as chart expressions. For instance, the user can display a list of all clients and the total sales for that client.
9. Sheet objects backgrounds. Backgrounds are now available in additional sheet objects like list boxes, current selections, bookmark objects and search objects.
Sheet Objects Backgrounds
10. Selection styles. New list box styles. LED checkboxes display a new look with the LED style and checkbox behaviors.
Selection Styles
Bonus! Menu caption icon. A new icon to show the user the context menu instead of right clicking an object.
Menu Caption Icon
Daniel Thomas Named Chair of Dallas OUG Committee
US-Analytics business intelligence guru Daniel Thomas has been appointed the Chairman of the Supply Chain for the Dallas Oracle User Group. His duties will include informing the oracle community by hosting events and providing user stories and content.
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