The QlikView Business Discovery Platform has long been a favourite among those who rely on BI. The platform and QlikView’s associated services have experienced rapid growth over the last decade, growing to more than 1,000 clients in South Africa alone by 2012. The platform is known for its ability to help users uncover insights other BI tools overlook, as well as putting data into visualisations that make it easy to understand and explain to others who may not be as fluent in BI. The next generation, known as QilkView.Next, is designed to do this in an even more intuitive way. This will allow users to better analyse, visualise and interpret data, making it more useful in making decisions that grow their businesses.
QlikView, as a company, has a mission to understand the needs of their customers and to understand how their platform users work. A sneak peek into this new updated platform shows the results of this mission. The way users make use of their data has been both expanded and simplified in the upcoming version. The corporate vision of QlikView includes the desire to design platforms that anyone could use. Designed primarily to use with a touch interface on a tablet, the new version makes it extremely easy to interact with the program. Finding the information, analysing it and producing visualisations are all intuitive for most users.
Using data to determine the best next step is not as new of a concept as it may seem. In fact, we are all born with natural analytics. This means we all have natural fact-driven decision-making abilities. What has changed is the ability to collect and analyse a large amount of data specific to an individual company or client base. Today, most top business leadership has evolved to the point where they naturally use this data to make decisions. QlikView.Next makes every step of the process easier. No longer is it up to the user to put the data findings into a form that can be understood by upper management or those who are not tech savvy. Instead, the platform itself is designed to present visualisations of the data in an easy-to-understand format. The platform moves easily from analysing data into storytelling mode and back again, allowing persuasive arguments to be carefully built and refined. It also allows collaboration and discussion in a much easier way. Other users can be given permission to view data sets, so every member of the decision-making team has the same access to the same data no matter where they are. This enables every part of the team — from top management to hourly worker — to stay in the loop of what is going on, and to feel confident in the decisions that are being made based on the data. In today’s world, data is key to making the decisions that determine the future of a company. Along with this growing importance, data governance is also more critical than in the past. For QlikView.Next, the security features have also been updated, meaning data is more secure than ever.