Walking In Your Shoes
To get real business solutions from your consultants, make sure they walk in your shoes.
Over the past few years, there’s been an exponential rise in the talk about how data is growing at an exponential rate. We’ve seen enormous, leading-edge improvements to technology that can assimilate that amount of data – providing new ways to drive insights and predictive models. All of which is intended to help businesses create better solutions for their end users to make better decisions.
The fundamental element in that statement was better solutions. How do you make sure
you are delivering better solutions
to your end users with this enormous amount of data? To learn a bit more, I spent some time with Brian Jacobson,
a Qlik Solutions Consultant for Healthcare. Brian has been with Qlik for over
three years, and prior to that, a healthcare software consultant for another three
years. His mission at Qlik is about delivering solutions to our healthcare
customers.
Brian explained that most of the customers he worked with have some idea of what business problem they are trying to solve – or what KPI they are trying to gain insights on – with a goal of determining if there is a need to take different action. In the world of healthcare, maybe it’s around quality of care, reimbursement rates, or infection management. Regardless of the topic, delivering better analytic solutions often starts with who you bring in to help the end users define and design their solution – i.e., the consultant.
Brian’s perspective of a good solutions consultant should be that they not only have a background in the specific business topic, but also a deep understanding in the specific technology that it will be delivered on. In his case, Brian understands healthcare and has developed many healthcare applications on Qlik.
However, his most important advice was, “to have one foot on the side of the technology, and one foot on the side of the customer”. For Brian, this means that he wants to be sure the customer is getting the most out of their technology investment without having to make designs that are over-complicated. So sometimes, his advice is to start small and work their way up. Conversely, he also wants to be sure that the customer doesn’t feel that they’ve made no real progress from what they have today, so other times he pushes them beyond their comfort zone. Either way, he’s focused on what’s best for the customer, even if it changes or impacts his work. When his customers see that, they will know that they can trust him, and can seek his advice when creating the right business solutions.
So whether you are using your own internal consultant, a consulting firm, or even a Qlik solutions consultant – Brian’s advice is to be sure you have someone who is thinking about how the solution will be used by real users, and about how you are getting the most out of their technology investment. You want someone who will be a participant along with your users based on their prior customer experience and/or their own research on the newest trends in your industry. In other words, you want someone who strives to be your trusted analytics solutions advisor.
