The most important business book of my career is “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.
The book introduced me to the Theory of Constraints and the
identification (and eradication) of bottlenecks to increase throughput.
The application of this process is explained in a setting of a
manufacturing plant but if you read it with the idea of attacking the
business problems that face you every day: you will be more successful.
It is not a stretch, for example, to compare reporting & analysis
responsibilities in banks to a manufacturing process. At the heart of
the problem is a process that includes bottlenecks. An organization can
experience transformational change by knocking out these bottlenecks
and engaging in the world of continuous improvement.
To be more specific, the goal of reporting and analysis is to provide decision makers with the necessary information to make the best decisions. Here are three bottlenecks that can be aggressively pursued with a modern analytics platform:
The great news is that technology has leap-frogged the business problem and Qlik’s modern analytics platform has the capacity to completely eliminate all three of these bottlenecks. I’ll give you an example. Last summer, a Reporting & Analytics Director from a top global bank presented at a Financial Services event and told the audience that they no longer use spreadsheets in their organization. I challenged him in the Q&A after the speech and he admitted that other departments still send them spreadsheets but his team has, in fact, eliminated them. This is not an outlier.
Aggressively identify, pursue and eliminate the bottlenecks using a modern analytics platform as your foundation. There are many ways to get started and we have eliminated several bottlenecks with Qlik Sense Cloud Business, here is a short video:
Also, you can send an email to paul.vansiclen@qlik.com if you would like access to a collection of Financial Service specific applications on my Qlik Cloud.