QlikView

Tattoo vs Make-up , which one you like for Business Intelligence outcome?

I have been thinking to write about this blog post for some time due to hectic times; my meeting with one of the world giant SAP customer triggered me to do this. I was at customer site with one of our senior consultant for QlikView requirements that they ask us to do with QV. What we have realized that this SAP customer has been using QlikView for years happily, since it gives them advanced visualization, intuitive simple usage, fast, spontaneous  as well as provide unknown and hidden facts in addition to SELF-DEVELOPMENT. Their usage is very much primitive from BI perspective, since they develop QV files and share with others with either e-mail or via centralized folder. (there is no even QV server). The customer told me that they have completed BW project long time ago followed by Business Objects implementation after BO acquisition. The surprising fact is that they have never quit QV usage, not even thought about it. (they are using outdated version of QV though ) Despite their primitive usage as well as too many manual data load or extraction into excel files from SAP, they were extremely happy to use Qlikview. Whenever our topic came to do “why do you do such a lot of manual works prior to QV ” , they were not even satisfied internally by their response , since they knew that it was meaningless from technical perspective but what they have been doing is that “ignore politics instead of fighting internal with IT ” . Situation was clear. They had to implement BW in the past, they had to implement BO and they have to use it anyway but satisfaction has never been obtained by business users, so they continued to use QV.   When we look at BI usage; however, sales, finance even C-Level management use QV. Actually to honest, we have been often faced similar cases, especially at SAP customers. However, there is also fact that business users are happy with QlikView regardless of what they have invested.  While we were showing some reactions against this habit, we are pretty much used to seeing it. It is not our job to criticize customers; in fact, we now enjoy seeing it. Why? Because as a BI service supplier, this is very much satisfying to see how QV is inevitable for business users, while we used to deal with always IT for many issues with traditional BI tools. These users always advocate about QV, which bring many other projects, even if they cannot extend the internal QV deployment due to political war.

Yes QlikView is like a perfectly designed tattoo on each business bodies (units) that nobody can easily take it off, while traditional BI tools act in the organizations just temporarily make up? Doubtless, this is just “similitude”, but don’t you think that kinda correct? Business expects to meet their expectations  permanently.