It is No Longer Adequate for IT to Seek Business Requirements from Users
Qlik works with organizations that enable their workforce to access data analytics from multiple types of channels and devices
Recently, I have been spending a lot of the summer holiday period meeting with several customers discussing their data analytics strategy and deployment. The best part of my job is when I am meeting with companies who have an appetite and desire to get analytical insight shared to as many people inside their organization as possible.
And without a doubt, this is a trend that continues to grow, with many employees inside companies today having access to information that they never had in the past, this was either due to constraints put on by IT restricting access linked to the culture inside organizations or the technology bandwith would not allow.
Today Qlik works with many organizations that enable their workforce to access data analytics from multiple types of channels and devices. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 4g, 5g and smartphone and tablets means we are no longer limited in our access to information.
A great example of this is Rentokil, one of the largest business services companies in the world who is using Qlik cloud-based platform to gain better insights from Rentokil’s Internet of Things (IoT) product roll out. So far, Rentokil has extended its range of connected rodent control products to over 20,000 digital devices, running in 12 countries globally. These IoT units can automatically alert technicians when a rodent is caught, while customers are kept informed through the myRentokil online portal.
However, I believe we are at a point of change where IT divisions should operate differently with their internal customers, the business users of data analytics. Whereas for many years I have worked alongside IT and business users, the best approach has always been to document what is required in terms of analytics and insights from the business users who are going to be the beneficiary of the data.
The speed of change in technology innovation of serving up data to business users has dramatically changed in the past 3 years. Whereas before for many years the question asked by IT organization to business users to understand their requirements was simply; what type of report do you want; how do you want it to look and how frequent do you want to receive it?
Today I don’t believe business users have an awareness of the transformational change happening in the analytical technology industry. This is becoming more apparent as we start to showcase the possibilities of giving access to business users through self-service, cloud, embedding analytics inside companies websites or providing every employee inside the organization with mobile or chat bot technology to surface their data.
The technology has now reached a level of maturity in analytical platform capabilities that IT organizations must take more responsibility to keep updated of the technology opportunities as well as brief this to the business. Or else the answer from business users is going to remain in the past in terms of requirements simply because they will continue to be unware of what is possible.
