I’ve recently come out of a series of Gartner events around Data and Analytics, which I had the privilege to attend in both London and Orlando. As a former industry analyst, I’ve seen from both sides of the fence how this event has grown into a global franchise, getting bigger, and in more places every year, a barometer of the importance people attribute to this growing space.
During these, I got the chance to meet a lot of prospects and customers. I especially took joy in co-presenting two sessions with customers. While two very different stories from one another, a uniting theme is how they’ve partnered with Qlik to drive true transformational impact for their organizations. They also tied closely with what might at first look seem conceptual and thematic – around Data Literacy, 2019 trends, and transformational value, providing further validation that we are skating to where the puck is going. Let me tell you a bit more about these amazing stories here:
Nationwide – Data Literacy in action
I had the honor of joining Paul French, Director of Business Intelligence, Visualization & Reporting, as he told his story of how they’ve driven success, through overcoming what is perceived as the two biggest barriers to success (per Gartner); driving a data enabled culture and data literacy.
Take-aways from me is that Nationwide did this through strong executive buy-in spearheaded by a CDO, and connecting diverse analytical groups. This has enabled them to do internal marketing – what they called “stories” – highlighting successful analytic initiatives, underlining that they’ve really understood the importance of storytelling, in combination with having a clear business case. Beyond raising awareness, there has also been a focus on building and nurturing a community. Imperative has been on driving up adoption, focusing in on teaching their members “how to fish”, in a more self-service way, using Qlik’s technology, but also using their own, as well as Qlik’s data literacy assets. Simple video “explainers”, have regular business people explain complex things like GDPR in ways that their audiences could understand. You can learn more about Nationwide’s journey in data-driven transformation here, showing that a good partnership is about so much more than just technology.
Conde Nast – innovation and trends in action
If Nationwide was a best-in-class study on cultural transformation, then Conde Nast is the same for partnering with Qlik for innovation transformation. For those of you that listened to the trends webinar earlier this year, you know that it was futures oriented, and I can honestly say that few if any vendors, let alone customers are ticking most of the trends I went through. And yet, Conde Nast, under the supervision of Oliver Gomes, Executive Director of Business Intelligence, is pushing innovation to such a level that, in our discussion, we covered off most of them with real world in-house examples of what they are already doing, or are planning to do in the near term. Some things that stood out were how Conde is fully leveraging Qlik as an open platform, i.e. the engine, APIs and extensions to build their own custom visualizations to an audience (it’s publishing after all), with very high requirements. They’ve segmented their users to different groups, and are right-sizing analytic content for these different constituents to maximize outcomes and adoption. Conde is leveraging the Qlik platform for internal users who need data for analysis to run the business, as well as for consumers on the website who come online and read content with visualization and storytelling for millions of users, as well as increasingly also for advertisers who give them revenue, morphing into data as a service. They are also very early adopters of conversational analytics (Qlik Insight Bot), and Associative Big Data Indexing. Sustaining leadership in a very competitive space, and making a trillion data points a day consumable, I guess you have to.
Standing on stage with these two customers, hearing their story was truly awe-inspiring. It drove home the importance of partnerships, where we learn from our customers, and innovate together. In this new era of customer success, experience and value is everything.
If you want to hear more from our customers, as well as how we are pushing vision and strategy with them, leading to impact, Qonnections is a great place to do so. I will myself present the 2019 trends, be in a discussion panel around data futures, and have a bunch of partner-facing sessions. So, I hope to see you there!
