Quick Answers from Faster Dashboards - Icon Resources...answer questions—putting business users in...

Quick Answers from Faster Dashboards

CITO ResearchTell Us a Question.

AUGUST 2010

Sponsored by QlikView

Contents

Introduction 1

QuickAnswersComefromSpeedinAllItsForms 1

TraditionalDashboardsWereFocusedonControl,NotSpeed 2

LivingDashboardsEvolveandChangeattheSpeedofBusiness 3

QuickAnswersComefromIndividualsMovingFast,AidedbyLivingDashboards 5

TheEnablersofLivingDashboards 7

QlikView:EnablingQuickAnswersThroughLivingDashboards 7

1QlikViewQuick Answers from Faster Dashboards


IntroductionTo have maximum impact, above all else, business intelligence (BI) dashboards must be fast. They must be created fast, perform fast, and adapt fast to find quick answers and ultimately make an important difference. Dashboards collect all of the infor-mation and analytical tools needed to support a person playing a specific role in a business. Although dashboards have always been part of BI, new developments have made them the center of the action.

Unfortunately, the need for speed is at odds with the original architecture of BI systems, which were designed to mitigate risk and control information. In practice, traditional dashboards are delivered slowly, perform slowly, and are implemented slowly because of the significant resources traditional BI vendors demand from IT staff. Speed comes with the right kind of dashboard—one with the power to ask and answer questions—putting business users in the driver’s seat. These living dashboards are powerful tools in their own right, built around a new computing paradigm— in-memory associative search—that no longer locks data away but makes it acces-sible to all. Unlike traditional BI, living dashboards are fast, decentralized, and easy to change. They deliver results quickly and have the ability to rapidly propagate through an organization of thousands of people.

This paper explains how living dashboards enable quick answers by empowering business users.

QuickAnswersComefromSpeedinAllItsFormsQuick answers aren’t a function of faster servers or IT working overtime to bring a new dashboard online. Speed is cumulative—the sum of many small advantages—and sometimes it can be transformative. What kind of speed are we talking about?

The speed of exploration. Can you probe and explore data freely, or do you have to build elaborate queries?

The speed of response. Does your dashboard return answers immediately, or are you stuck waiting for reports?

The speed of change. Can dashboards be reconfigured easily and customized by the users themselves, or are they hardwired and require IT’s intervention to make even small changes?



The speed of expansion. How difficult is it to add a new data set to your dashboard? Point-and-click or painfully manual, requiring mind-bendingly complex joins every time?

The speed of understanding. How quickly can you define aggregates that help the dashboard tell a story? How easy is it to create charts to visualize what the data is telling you? Can you see the charts change as selection criteria change?

The speed of propagation. Can you clone your dashboard and make a copy for someone else? Can you invent an incredibly useful new metric and distribute it to everyone in the company—or vice versa? Or is your dashboard a one-off that can’t easily be shared or replicated?

The speed to value. The faster your dashboard can be created and adapted, the faster the cost of implementation falls, causing ROI to rise accordingly. The faster good dashboards propagate, the faster value is created. This is a virtuous circle: the cheaper and most importantly easier to use your dashboard becomes, the more people are willing to experiment with it—leading to the quick wins that justify creating it.

TraditionalDashboardsWereFocusedonCon-trol,NotSpeedThe fatal flaw of traditional dashboards was the intermediation by IT. Real-world con-ditions changed far too quickly for the predetermined metrics to keep up, leading to a disconnect between users’ needs and their dashboards’ capabilities. Efforts to revise dashboards inevitably ran afoul of internal politics, prohibitive costs, and a failure to justify the ROI. IT operated on computing cycle times lasting months (if not years), rather than the speed of business, which could be measured in hours, days, and weeks. Dashboard projects often ended when money or patience ran out, and even if they finished, users were frequently barred from making changes. The countdown to their obsolescence began the moment they were rolled out.



Dashboardsendupinthegraveyardformanyreasons:

• The IT bottleneck: If all changes must be done by someone else, the dashboard falls out of date

• Starvation for relevant data: It can take weeks to add a new data set to a BI infrastructure, reducing the relevancy of the dashboard while waiting

• Slow motion experimentation: When users cannot do things for themselves, when questions take a long time to answer, the pace of change slows, delays mount, and the cycle of experimentation is stifled

• Dashboard fatigue: The process of using and changing traditional dash-boards can become tedious. People find other ways of solving problems rather than suffering with hard to use tools

LivingDashboardsEvolveandChangeattheSpeedofBusinessAs the name implies, a living dashboard is a living thing, always changing, evolving, and maturing. Rather than being the frozen-in-amber product of an eighteen-month development effort, living dashboards are implemented in a matter of days or even hours. From there, they evolve iteratively, at the pace of business rather than the pace of computing cycles, and at the guidance of users rather than IT. You start with a hunch and explore it by adding more data and then gain understanding by summarizing the data into aggregate metrics and charts. In fits and starts, the right dashboard comes into shape.

This is why living dashboards become more and more useful over time. In addition, the deeper understanding gained often leads to the discovery of leading indicators for success or risks. Metrics evolve and are replaced by more accurate ones discovered by users on the front lines. What was a top-down process is replaced with a more democratic, bottom-up one. Speed and discovery replaces risk management and delivery as the goal of BI, which enables quick answers.



Figure 1: Keeping Dashboards Alive

The user has an idea

The user assembles a dashboard from scratch, or starts

with an existing one

The user makes changes

The user repeats the change cycle until the dashboard

provides what the business needs

Living Dashboards Stay Alive Because:

Users can make changes themselves: The cycle of innovation continues in a rapid �ow directed by the users themselves

User-directed drilldown: Users can drill down the paths they decide are important, not those planned for them or by them in advance

Data can come and go as needed: New tables can be added to the mix so you can keep the �ow of analysis going

Cheap and fast experimentation: Once users are in charge, the evolution of the dashboard is rapid. They’re in touch with the pulse of the business and have a true sense of empowerment

Knowledge sharing: Dashboards, KPIs, tips, and tricks propagate around a company like shared decks of presentation slides, creating a culture of innovation

ERP Data

ERP Data

CRM Data

Internal App

“Eureka!”

Fast response: You can see what the data is telling you



QuickAnswersComefromIndividualsMovingFast,AidedbyLivingDashboardsWhen living dashboards are introduced and begin to propagate—not by fiat from the top-down, but by users from the ground up—there is typically a burst of energy as the pent-up frustration with traditional dashboards gives way to excitement and a feeling of empowerment. For the first time, users are truly in touch with the business. They’re able to test assumptions, eliminate waste, troubleshoot problems, and simply make things better. Users know more about the processes on their watch than IT ever did, they’re working harder than ever, and, as their work becomes more meaningful, they find a sense of purpose.

This sense of purpose flows from the fact that they’re suddenly able to answer ques-tions they long ago stopped bothering to ask. This is the lowest hanging fruit, and the more users who adopt living dashboards, the more fruit that gets picked. This is the essence of finding quick answers.

Living dashboards find results in time to matter, and this newfound visibility impacts performance. The ability to see the consequences of your decisions forces you to think harder about them. With the right metrics in place, a manager reviews team performance in an open and transparent manner, rewarding high performers and pushing new team members to strive toward clearly defined personal benchmarks.

And then there are team goals as well. A metric that ties a company’s energy use to its root costs, for example, instantly motivates managers and employees to eliminate quantifiable waste. If good metrics change awareness, then awareness invariably changes behavior. And this awareness can emerge anywhere in the company—an individual, a team, a division—and quickly propagate via their dashboards. Dash-boards become like decks of presentation slides that are passed around, reordered, edited, and embellished by users for their own purposes. Given the chance to create their own metrics and KPIs, they will take it. And often those dashboards are better than anything anyone in IT or the executive suite might have come up with. Quick answers come when innovation trickles up—or sideways. The best ideas can be officially distributed, so instead of ten metrics or leading indicators being passed down from the top, there are dozens or even hundreds—more answers.



Figure 2: How Living Dashboards Lead to Quick Answers

Living dashboards close the loop: The people in control of a process can now get information about a process and how it works. They can see the e�ect of their actions and use the knowledge to �nd leading indicators and suggest optimizations

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can ee theuse

Living dashboards harvest low-hanging fruit: Once user-controlled technology arrives, everyone can get what they have always wanted. The result is a burst of energy, innovation, and optimization

Dashboard do what they were planned to do, but not any-thing more

Dashboards are the end of a process, not the beginning

Living dashboards propagate knowledge: Discoveries from one part of the business, either about the processes of the business or about how to use dashboards, can be shared and then tuned for each particular situation

Living dashboards jumpstart innovation: People stop asking questions when they cannot get answers. When they can get answers, they start asking again. Answers lead to more questions and eventually better solutions

Living dashboards increase accountability: More visibility equals more accountability. When living dashboards turn the lights on, everyone can see who is performing and who is not

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TheEnablersofLivingDashboardsWhat does it take to build a living dashboard? What capabilities are needed and what technical work is necessary to make this dream a reality? The good news is that the technology already exists. Traditional dashboards were designed in a computing uni-verse of scarcity—slow processors, limited storage capacity, and ruinously expensive memory. But everything has changed. Repeated cycles of Moore’s Law1 have made memory cheap and hardware exponentially more powerful. The number of 64-bit cores on an Intel processor is doubling every eighteen months while the cost per gi-gabyte of solid-state memory is plummeting. Now it’s possible to load entire databas-es into memory for instant analysis (known as “in-memory”), something that was once prohibitively expensive. Traditional BI applications don’t reflect this. Their architecture was designed to cope with resource bottlenecks; today, BI itself is the bottleneck. In contrast, living dashboards allows users true self-service so that users can easily create their own view of the data, allowing IT to focus on managing capacity and deployment rather than servicing an endless queue of report change requests.

QlikView:EnablingQuickAnswersThroughLivingDashboardsQlikView is a new kind of BI software that lets you stop guessing and start knowing how to make faster, smarter decisions. QlikView’s goal is simple: to provide the tools for living dashboards, helping customers explore and visualize data that enables them to personally find answers and drive innovation. QlikView takes an alternative view of BI that can be summarized in three steps:

Consolidate: Identify related data sets, map the associations between them, and load it all into memory

Search: Explore the data using point-and-click “list boxes,” which display infor-mation included and excluded from the selection criteria. Aggregate measures can be easily defined and are updated instantly as the selection criteria changes

Visualize: Maps, charts, and assorted graphics can be created and instantly updated

1 Formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, Moore’s Law states that computing power, as measured by the number of transistors that can be efficiently placed on an integrated circuit, doubles every two years.



QlikView aims to increase your chances of making genuine discoveries and eliminates much of the grind:

No SQL queries, no middleman: You click to select data and click again to deselect it

Matching and non-matching data are displayed: You can see what is high-lighted, and what is not highlighted. You can see which data was excluded and see what happens when you mix it in

No waiting: The answers are right in front of you

The idea behind QlikView is that a simple process for asking questions and encour-aging individual exploration leads to better answers, insights, and innovations. It does this by replacing database queries and cubes with its associative in-memory architecture. Rather than precalculating answers, the software loads data sets into memory and maps the associations between them. The user’s job is to understand the data, not to grapple with the technology. QlikView is associative; there are no pre-determined paths and no precalculations—you tailor metrics to show just what you need. You can ask as many questions as you like until you find the important insights. Because it’s all done in-memory, the answers are returned instantly and updated continuously. Your BI is no longer as good as your IT department’s last cube—it’s as good as the questions you ask.

CITOResearch

CITO Research is a source of news, analysis, research, and knowledge for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT and business professionals. CITO Research engages in a dialogue with its audience to capture technology trends that are harvested, analyzed and communi-cated in a sophisticated way to help practitioners solve difficult business problems.

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