Bringing Certainty in an Uncertain World

Agility and speed have become top requirements for organizations as a result of the global disruptions created by the events such as COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, disruptions in supply chains, and more recently the tragic geopolitical conflict. Today, more than ever, business leaders need to focus on bringing analytics and insights closer to the point of decision, compel actions and make it easier to track the ROI and impact of these actions.

Over the next few years, organizations will increasingly see the need for more advanced and flexible analytic applications capabilities to support, augment and automate decisions.

For me all of these needs require a new way of thinking on how to deliver data and analytics. It is time to make the shift from the traditional linear decision support systems to closed loop decision automation.

Why Is It Time For a Change?

Over the last two decades, analytics and data technology providers have been focusing on data integration and analytics creation. The significant emphasize on these two areas limited the focus of innovations on linear decision support systems. This has resulted “Insights to No action” states in organizations with the growing number of low analytics value data assets that do not really compel actions.

Here are the three biggest obstacles that we as an industry have focused on over the last 2 decades and the resulting gaps in value delivered:

• Focus on self-service analytics with generation of insights from the data and de-emphasizing other important areas of analytics and decision-making flows such as information gathering and use through to collaborative decision making, action taking, monitoring the impact of these actions and back again to information. The decision-making environment in most organizations today seldom lives up to all aspects of this model. The loop is fragmented between different tools, such as dashboards, spreadsheets, BI discovery tools, collaborative tools, RPAs and so on.
• Compartmentalization of two separate domains around data integration and data analytics, and historically building solutions for each area typically owned distinctly by IT and the business respectively. The result is that IT typically has more data than the business really feels is accessible, leaving a small intersection between IT and the business for high analytics value data assets, resulting in lower analytics adoption.
• Focus on user needs for insights generation, missing the important value that comes from impact monitoring. Tracking the ROI and impact of business decisions requires a shift in user roles from insight stewardship to impact stewardship; promoting users from a posture of decision support (insight stewardship) to one of decision automation (impact stewardship).

We believe it is time for a change. If you are a business leader managing your organization’s digital transformation, these are three areas of innovation that needs to be on the top of your priority list:

• Democratized development, integration and governance tools enabling business units, in partnership with central IT, to take an increasingly hands-on role in forming their analytics application experiences, either with the use of hybrid data integration, catalog, or self-service analytics with augmented capabilities and Auto-ML.
• The arrival of low-/no-code capabilities extending the scope of analytics applications enabling end users to assemble composed analytic applications that would previously have required software development expertise to build. Citizen developers and business technologists can now extend the reach and connectedness of how analytics is used, for example, to trigger workflow processes in operational apps based on analytic outputs. This also enables these users to compose and self-publish analytic based business process automations and applications.
• Composable architectures supported by cloud based micro-services and APIs, enabling users to assemble the needed packaged data and analytics capabilities (both descriptive and predictive) right into business applications to improve business decision making.

If you would like to drive change in your organization and re-engineer the decision-making process by using data to direct and orchestrate actions, please join us at QlikWorld 2022.

You will be inspired by the value an Active Intelligence approach can deliver, and learn more about how Qlik can help make this a reality for you.