I clip in and drive down on the pedals with all of my energy, legs turning and lungs burning as my heart rate soars during this cycling test. I continue to push my limits during this eight-minute, all-out effort. Why would anyone put themselves through such an exercise? The answer is testing. It is a great method to determine the current baseline, establish targeted areas for development and set milestone events.
As an athlete, my coach leverages testing to gauge my fitness and physiological thresholds to best align my training plan. Test results provide feedback on how I am responding to the training, leading to adjustments in training volume or intensity. My training plan is then modified based on the results to new targets or focus areas to ensure the adaption needed to achieve my endurance goals. It’s these adjustments that provide the prescriptive plan which results in optimized performance and continued growth as an athlete.
As for analytics, testing can be applied to two vital resources: the personnel administering, developing or maintaining the solution and the systems leveraged for insights. Assessing personnel to ensure proper skills results in improved solution adoption. The Qlik Skills Assessment delivered by Qlik provides insights to current personnel skill levels which can be compared to the needs of the organization to ensure goals and deliverables can be met. The results are vital to ensure your team is properly prepared to support your deployment or leverage the solution. The same assessment can be leveraged for your business partners supporting your implementation. Testing is a great method to ensure your team is prepared and capable to handle the demands of a vital analytics infrastructure. In addition, the results of these assessments identify areas of focus to define a personalized training path and opportunity for professional growth.
Recently one of our top financial services customers leveraged the Qlik Skills Assessment with the Center of Excellence to ensure they are properly skilled. Instead of a one size fits all training for their team, we worked together and using the test results to personalize the training for each individual maximizing the impact of their training. Just as my coach is leveraging results to define my plan moving forward the same is done for your team to drive towards the best in class service your organization desires.
From a system perspective, the feedback discovered through scalability testing provides insight into the loads your systems can accommodate in the current state and simulate scenarios to determine the level of future demand. I see organizations struggle with underperforming systems that process too long and run slowly, resulting in low adoption and poor customer satisfaction. Most times these frustrating situations can be avoided by testing to ensure the system is prepared to handle the demands. Qlik Scalability tools and Diagnostic tools are good resources to test and analyze your system for both the demands of today and needs for tomorrow.
Leveraging the insights gained from this exercise can lead to adding resources to existing hardware, tuning settings or architecting your system to leverage cloud or elastic infrastructure with a multi-cloud approach. My team is working with a Risk Management firm that encountered performance issues of one of their applications. We leveraged the Scalability tools to assess the server performance and the App Evaluator to review the application. Recommendations for adding additional CPU to the server and replacing underperforming row-based calculations with optimal expressions reduced the application performance from minutes to running in seconds. As a result, they have been able to deploy this application to more of their customers, generating additional revenue and delivering value to their customers.
Using the feedback of testing in an analytics culture leads you to be proactive instead of reactive. It allows you to best serve your business community ensuring an ability to execute increasing solution adoption and preventing system disruptions with can lead to costs, revenue loss and drop in client satisfaction.
