Qlik Enterprise Enablement, Governance

As we enter a Data Economy the Qlik analytics and visualisation platform is robust and scalable to fit the needs of most enterprise wide next generation BI requirements. That is, Qlik products can meet the needs of both self service data visualisation and more structured traditional BI guided analytics requirements.

Smarter.BI applications that contain business rules logic and data can then be deployed upon this platform to build a centralised decision making platform removing the need to report or make decisions from transactional systems or legacy reporting applications. This drives ROI. Once data is tamed it can be used for competitive advantage in the new Data Economy.

Coupled with complimentary next generation tools Qlik’s functionality can also be extended to create a full end-to-end reporting solution, or #GreenStack (as we call it), and meet the needs for many clients EG from a budgeting and planning perspective to mobile sales order analysis, being deployed on or off premise and in cloud, with external data feeds. This extends use and adoption of the platform.

We need to look at the main challenge of strategic adoption of a Smarter.BI Application Platform powered by Qlik as a highly available decision making platform, #HADMP. That challenge is managing a Smarter.BI Application Platform powered by Qlik as a service within your organisation. Again for competitive advantage this is all about speed. Decision makers need accurate and timely intelligence to make decisions from.

In a structured service delivery framework model with waterfall development standards adoption of Qlik can be see very much an outsider from a traditional IT point of view. Qlik products are traditionally deployed using agile development techniques and there is a gap. One that is easily filled by planning and adopting a logical approach to the needs of the business. We advise on how to deliver Smarter.BI application platform as a service backed up with a data-centric architecture to be both highly performant yet secure and compliant, complimented where necessary with tools from our #GreenStack.

At Differentia Consulting we recognise that to deliver Smarter.BI application platform as a service to a business like any other business application requires; a service delivery framework to be in place, the development/change life cycle to be understood and adopted to bridge the gap, and thirdly a level of assurance put in place to ensure that the service meets the quality and time needs of the business. We advise this certification at three levels for a Smarter.BI application platform deployment;

• Certify The Data (Quality/Lineage)
• Certify The Process (Governance)
• Certify The Output (Provenance)

What do we mean by certification? Simply that there is a feedback mechanism in place to report on the well-being of the component being managed-governance. Adopting exception management allows for the services to be governed in a less disruptive way thus ensuring maximum up-time compared to planned up-time. By monitoring, measuring and managing this way we can look to improve our business velocity volume and value.

Certify The Data

Smarter.BI application platform powered by Qlik feeds off data from one or multiple sources. Each of these data sources delivers data to the eventual output that is used to make better business decisions and thus it needs to be accurate and timely. Optimising data quality and data source management is just one element of delivering a Smarter.BI application platform powered by Qlik as a service

Certify The Process

The business rules and business logic that drive the presentation of data that lead to better business decisions is based around the ability to provide what we call a certified process. The concept is simple and a matter of reverse engineering the output to the feeds that create it. The requirements of scheduled data delivery/reloads need to be understood and implemented in order to create the right data at the right time.  As part of the service definition we can continually improve the back end processes that feed Smarter.BI application documents and the management of the documents themselves by creating certified processes. Good governance is then required to manage.

Certify The Output

The final component is output validation. Whether Smarter.BI applications are deployed to the enterprise of locally to a department our best practice would dictate that each and every Smarter.BI document has controls and exception reporting (integrity checking) in place to ensure that what the decision maker is looking at is what the decision maker should be looking at by way of meaningful intelligence. Further we can trace each data element to its source (provenance).

With this type of governance in place the culture of an organisation will adapt to embrace achieve competitive advantage in the data economy.

Architecture for an enterprise data-centric deployment of a Smarter.BI application platform powered by Qlik, #GreenStack, with high availability, #HADMP.

Application Architecture, memory is the capacity constraint

Architecture is driven by many factors but one simple way is to understand the capacity of memory available to business users at any one time in a given location.  IT will provide capacity as memory and the business will consume it. That is the basic service.

Application Infrastructure, ability to meet availability service levels.

The challenge is provide the infrastructure to an agreed level of usage need or availability. Considerations for Performance + Availability (technology used to present Qlik to the consumers) Disaster Recovery High Availability all need to be considered and planned for. Data access is critical. If time to data is too high then we look to deploy a more performant architecture to reduce this time to deliver the business benefit. E.g. using Analytics Databases. Infrastructure needs to scale and adapt to compete in the new ‘data economy’.

Application Development; Agile + Waterfall

Pre and post production release development standards will mean that agile development can be employed for prototyping testing and building of production Smarter.BI applications. Once deployed into production these applications by their nature become more static and as any change has a business impact this can be catered for by Waterfall development processes, to mitigate risk.

As part of any enterprise deployment of Smarter.BI application platform powered by Qlik Differentia Consulting will create a plan that encompasses all of the above. The professional services that we provide are meant to dovetail into your need and help create the best possible business case and use scenario.
Differentia Consulting will help build the solution that is the service and assist in deploying all the components required to create a solution that meets the performance, and availability requirements of the services and the ongoing support of it. Covering full application life cycle management.