The Business Intelligence iPod
The iPod has changed how we store, search for and listen to music. People download singles because they can search freely amongst them for the ones they want to listen to. QlikView has changed how business analyse their business, looking for ad hoc facts and freely associating apparently unrelated information. Data warehouses with pre-built reports (LPs in other words) restricted companies to looking at static reports focused on limited criteria. QlikView enables intuitive searching for things you didn't know.
The humble cassette. You had to find songs searching back and forth in linear fashion and even then you might only get an hour's worth. If you wanted to copy songs to cassette, the quality could suffer. Imagine not having all of your data available in one place, and only being able to look for it in one way. Worse still you might have to guess where to look, and then go back and forth in smaller and smaller increments. It's time consuming and insecure.
The compact disc revolution. Now you can hold more information and with some machines you can quickly shuffle through the first few seconds of the songs until you find the one you want. The only problem is, you have to use the data you're given and that might not be right. You can't do anything about that because nobody's thought of a way to make these recordable.
At least CDs fit nicely into a box so you can search through them quickly. But it's not very secure and you can't take the box with you so you're always stuck with the choice you've made. In business intelligence terms, you're still looking for information in straight lines and you still have only limited storage. You're also restricted by the fact that you have to make a choice: you can only play one CD at a time and that may not always be the one you want. If you're on the road and want to analyse supply chain efficiency but have the company accounts with you, you're a bit stuck.
OK, nice idea. So now you can take all the CDs with you. Suddenly, you have access to all the information all the time. But, it's big and unwieldy. It has to go in the boot of the car. And, the CDs get played in the order they're stored in: it's like all your data has been pre-aggregated so you can only ask the questions it's prepared to answer. It's like looking for information in your company's data warehouse the day before year end: there's so much data in there, it takes ages to learn anything.
The iPod changed the game. Like QlikView, the data is stored flat with no pre-aggregation so you can find songs in seconds. They can be listed however you want and acquired from anywhere. In business intelligence terms, you're in control of what you find out and that information can come from anywhere in your business. iPods are intuitive, so is QlikView. No more fact finding in straight lines with limited options: play what you want, when you want. Listen to something new; find out something you didn't know.
Our guide to how business intelligence mirrors the evolution of the iPod will help you understand how QlikView is different and why it could show you things you didn't know about your business, more simply, more quickly, and more cost effectively than ever before.