The Gartner BI Bake-Off 2021 Goes Viral and Takes on the Daunting Task of Analyzing Data Around the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Bake-Off process is fairly straight-forward, with vendors asked to prepare and showcase a range of capabilities to provide a side-by-side view of their various differences and strengths, based on a pre-defined topic and dataset.

This year’s topic was very timely. Participants were given data and a brief to review the current global state of COVID-19 vaccinations efforts, identify how vaccine administration might be impacting COVID outcomes and explore the effectiveness of other containment factors. It was no small task, considering the rapidly evolving nature of the data and the current progress made against the 60-70% global population vaccination target that the World Health Organization estimate is needed to hamper the spread.

Bruno Calver, a PreSales consultant in the UK, presented Qlik’s entry this year, with invaluable help from his Aussie counterpart Matt Grayndler, to form what was our own global response.

The two worked virtually, often outside their typical working hours, due to the time zone difference to create the Qlik entry. Their key objectives were to showcase Qlik’s unique analytics power, discover insights, tell a compelling story and enjoy the process.

This year, Bruno and Matt went full Qlik SaaS, both during the build process to facilitate collaboration, sharing and co-development, as well as for the final demonstration. This provided the opportunity to showcase a range of integrated and bundled capabilities on the SaaS platform, including:

• Insight Advisor Chat for conversational analytics
• Self-service alerting
• The integrated Data Catalog
• Autogenerated time-based analysis and dashboard
• User subscriptions to objects and sheets

Additionally, you get to see some possible future developments in section six, where there is a showcase of some important roadmap projects around collaboration and automations. This is all in aligned with Qlik’s unique Active Intelligence vision, where we aim to speed up the journey from changes in the data and in a business to trigger real-world actions. Below are examples from the dashboard we built.

Some Qlik insights and demonstration highlights:

• While the United States and the UK have administered a relative high number of vaccinations per 100, several central African nations are either yet to begin or report their first vaccinations, suggesting there’s work to do to ensure equitable access to the global population.
• This skewed distribution was further highlighted by identifying that the top nine countries which are responsible for 80% of total vaccinations, account for only 48% of the global population.
• Although Qlik’s birthplace of Sweden is currently experiencing a third wave of cases, deaths continue to trend downwards. Similar patterns are seen in The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and France.
• Comparing current COVID outcomes against government policy responses, those countries that have seen a higher total deaths per thousand rate generally seem to have been less stringent with international travel control measures at the onset of the pandemic.
• Employing Insight Advisor and natural language, we were able to visualize cohorts of similar countries together based on their total vaccinations and population, leveraging K-Means Clustering.
• Using Insights Advisor, we were able to perform detailed analysis of period changes, in this case, month-on-month analysis, with insights automatically generating an entire dashboard with multiple charts to allow us to assess vaccine roll-out performance between different U.S. States and Territories.

To see more about our innovative approach to modern analytics and some of the new features we're planning, visit our innovation and direction page.