Next Generation Analytics Consumption Is NOT About “Killing Dashboards”

As a product leader in the analytics space, it has been great to watch the evolution in the market. However, I still see most of the vendors are in a trap of building technologies that deliver insights but still fail at achieving the promise of BI, which is to compel actions.

This year, at Qlik, we launched the Active Intelligence Platform, setting us apart from other solutions in the market. In this blog post, I would like to focus on the platform's unique value, which is enabling users to go beyond insight delivery, driving human actions and pervasive decision automation for value realization.

Leading the shift from open loop decisions support to closed loop decision augmentation and automation with Active Intelligence

The BI market today places significant emphasis on discovery and self-service. Do not get me wrong; these areas are very important to drive data literacy in organizations, and, at Qlik, we have been innovating to support this mission with our Insight Advisor and Catalog capabilities. There is also a lot of talk these days about the dashboard being a thing of the past. As James mentioned in this blog, dashboards have their place and will continue to provide value for users’ investigatory analyses. Qlik has provided the leading associative technology for years to our users to gain unexpected insights from dashboards.

However, the focus on self service tends to de-emphasize another area of BI functionality that I have long believed to be vitally important to business success: a closed-loop process that spans from information gathering and use through to collaborative decision making, action taking, 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, and so on. Some areas are supported only poorly, if at all. For example, action taking may be instigated and tracked only through presentations and e-mails.

I call this challenge “Insights to No Action State.”

This human-led open loop results in key person dependencies on individuals and variability in the action that is taken. Too often, there is no action taken on the insight, which is common where there is so much new information and insights being served up that it becomes overwhelming to act upon.

Qlik’s Active Intelligence Platform closes the gaps between data, insights, and action with the only cloud platform built for Active Intelligence. With this platform, organizations can re-engineer the decision-making process by using data to direct and orchestrate actions. This also creates 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). And this is a huge value!

Let me explain this shift with an example from human resource management (HRM). In the HRM space, an analytics project can reveal a whole wealth of information, bringing people-related data together and empowering HR professionals to ask questions and get insights. Let’s assume one of these insights is the probability of a set of individuals to leave within a given timeframe, an insight being informed by key features driving this possibility. There is a set of automated actions that can be taken based on these key driver features that contribute to an employee’s likelihood of staying or leaving the organization. For example, one action could be alerting the manager with an automated email if an employee is at extremely high risk of leaving by explaining what features drives this probability. Or, issuing an automated survey to those who are less likely to leave to learn what motivates them. And, finally, the raw data that is generated by these automated processes can be integrated back to the analytics data, generating new insights to monitor the affect of these actions, resulting in closed loop decision augmentation.

This is what I mean by closed decision augmentation, and it is an actual scenario that you can set up today with Qlik’s Active Intelligence Platform by leveraging Data Integration, AutoML and Application Automation.

Next generation analytics consumption is NOT about “Killing Dashboards”; It is about creating action-focused, outcome-driven and trust-oriented consumption experiences leading to an Insights-Action state in organizations

It is now time for us to solve the Insights-No Action state challenge in organizations, making the promise of BI a reality with Active Intelligence.

In my next blog post, I will talk about how I see the next generation of analytics consumption experiences and the change in user roles in the data and analytics supply chain.