The Gap in Data and Analytics Supply Chains Requires a New Way of Thinking
Today, we announced the acquisition of the assets and IP of Knarr Analytics, an innovative start-up that provides real-time collaboration, sophisticated data exploration and insight capture capabilities, to complement Qlik’s cloud data and analytics platform. Acquiring Knarr Analytics advances Qlik’s vision of Active Intelligence, where technology and processes trigger immediate action from real-time, up-to-date data to accelerate business value across the entire data and analytics supply chain by augmenting and keeping users in the loop. In this blog post, I would like to share why I am excited about the acquisition of Knarr Analytics and the IP it brings to Qlik.
In this fast-moving world, with unexpected events like COVID-19, extended collaboration is needed, covering all type of users and personas across the full spectrum of data to insights
Traditionally, collaboration has been only thought of for analytics consumers. Most of today’s analytics and business intelligence products support some form of collaboration, providing capabilities that support the sharing of and communication about the output from the analytical pipeline. Don’t get me wrong, this is important; collaboration supports decision-making and those decisions typically involve multiple people. But the collaboration should not be limited to the “last mile” of the analytics pipeline.
The need to move fast, merge and use new data sources requires new thinking about collaboration, that extends the circle of collaboration beyond analytics consumers. In our vision for Active Intelligence, collaborative capabilities should cover the entire data and analytics supply chain, bringing all data and analytics personas, from data integrators and data stewards, BI developers and analytics consumers together.
The real-time, multi-player collaboration of Knarr eliminates the barrier between the data personas and analytics consumers. It enables these two separate, siloed worlds to start working together, collaborating to make raw data business ready and start gaining insights earlier in the analytics pipeline.
From Analytics Ready to Business Ready data with iterative, augmented exploration and further data refinement
How many times do analytics consumers ask business questions only to realize that they do not have the “business ready” data to answer their questions?
Business ready data is data that is not only curated for analytics consumption with the right format, aggregations and dimensionality, but is data that has the accurate, timely business logic and context applied to it.
A great example of this need has been raised during the COVID-19 pandemic; businesses need to apply new rules, calculations and logic to their data in a fast, iterative way. It is almost like applying design thinking on the data to make it business ready – where users can ideate and prototype with the data, applying new business logic that reflects the reality of the current world and situation in fast, iterative ways.
This requires a technology like Active Intelligence – where automated data integration with CDC merges with fast, associative, collaborative business transformations applied on the data with Knarr-like experiences.
Analytics need to move from Surveillance mode to Decision mode
Data and analytics doesn’t change the organization. Decisions do. Every decision drives value, from big strategic choices to thousands of operational micro-moments. We believe success will come to those who can make the right decisions in context, in the moment, for every moment, automating and scaling those decisions with powerful and trusted analytics with Active Intelligence.
However, decisioning is a complex process. It requires careful interpretation of the insights generated by the analytics and algorithms; understanding context; and sometimes necessitates further exploration, human collaboration, and finally capturing and communicating the decision with the right context.
I believe most analytics solutions in the market fail when it comes to supporting users with the right experiences and tools that facilitating decision making, because data or algorithms do not make decisions – people do.
I see great innovation opportunities ahead of us by leveraging the IP of Knarr Analytics to support decisioning, combined with the power of data integration, CDC and Insights Advisor to accelerate analytics to value for our users. Stay tuned!
