At the BI2010 Conference, held by ITWeb, in Johannesburg in February, attendees were asked to rate the success of their BI implementation. A tiny 19% of the respondents viewed their BI solutions as a success!
“This is a technology that's been around since 1989,” says Davide Hanan of QlikView South Africa. “It's had more than enough time to mature and prove itself. So when you get a 19% success rate with 11% of survey respondents saying their solutions are in trouble and may not survive, and another 26% saying 'it still needs to prove itself', that's a clear sign of failure.”
Hanan says the fact that most BI tools are extremely complicated to use, and deliver information only in the form of static reports, makes them effectively useless to business users. “A recent survey by one of our customers found that after 10 days of training, their executives stopped using their old-generation BI tool completely. Others in the business reduced their usage by 60%.”
Faced with this rapid abandonment, says Hanan: “IT departments tell themselves that their users are stupid, or that executives just aren't IT literate. That's not correct. It's just that the users aren't getting tools that work for them.”
Newer in-memory BI tools, in contrast with these dismal results, are scoring rave reviews from their users. “In an IDC survey conducted last year, a massive 96% of customers said they were satisfied with QlikView,” says Hanan. “The tangible benefits speak for themselves: customers experienced a 16% increase in revenue, 23% increase in cash flow and a 34% increase in productivity. And they achieved all this at an average 53% of the total cost of ownership of other solutions.”
The adoption of QlikView is being driven by business users, says Hanan. “This is a global phenomenon - in January, Gartner noted that what they call 'data discovery tool' architecture is being driven largely by business user buying.”
This gives the lie to the myth of “IT illiterate” executives, adds Hanan. “People become IT literate very quickly when you give them a good enough reason. We had one CEO who'd refused for years to use computers at all. Once we showed him a tool that genuinely gave him better insight into what was happening in his business, he bought a laptop within the week.
“This is what happens when you combine the speed of in-memory analysis with simple presentation and the ability for users to do associative thinking,” adds Hanan. “You get users who are able to operate at the peak of their capacity.”
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QlikView South Africa
QlikView South Africa is the local representative and distributor for QlikTech, whose powerful, accessible business intelligence solution enables organisations to make better and faster decisions. Its QlikView product delivers enterprise-class analytics and search with the simplicity and ease of use of office productivity software. The in-memory associative search technology it pioneered makes calculations in real-time enabling business professionals to gain insight through intuitive data exploration. Unlike traditional business intelligence products, QlikView can deliver value in days or weeks rather than months, years, or not at all. It can be deployed on premise, in the cloud, or on a laptop or mobile device - from a single user to large global enterprises. QlikTech is headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania, with offices around the world and a network of over 1 100 partners to serve more than 13 000 customers in over 100 countries worldwide.
For more information, please visit http://www.qlikview.co.za.
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