Enterprise Enablement …powered by Qlik

Qlik data analytics and data integration platform is robust and scalable to fit the needs of most enterprise-wide next-generation BI requirements augments by AI. That is, Qlik products can meet the needs of both self-service data visualisation and more structured traditional BI guided-analytics requirements, with options to use generative AI to drive further value.

Differentia Consulting offers AI enabled Smarter.BI applications that contain business rules logic and data can then be deployed upon this platform to build a centralised decision-making platform removing the need to report or make decisions from transactional systems or legacy reporting applications. This drives Return On Investment (ROI) as part of your Enterprise Enablement …powered by Qlik.

Coupled with complementary next-generation tools and third party integrated solutions Qlik’s functionality can also be greatly extended to create a full end-to-end reporting solution, or #GreenStack, and meet the needs for many clients; Eg from a budgeting and planning perspective to mobile sales order analysis, being deployed in Qlik Cloud or private cloud and on premise. This extends the use and adoption of the platform.

We need to look at the main challenges of Enterprise Enablement …powered by Qlik: with the strategic adoption of a Smarter.BI Application Platform powered by Qlik as a highly available decision-making platform, #HADMP. That challenge is managing a Smarter.BI Application Platform powered by Qlik, as a service, within your organisation.

In a structured service delivery framework model with waterfall development standards adoption of Qlik can be seen very much as an outsider from an IT point of view. Qlik products are traditionally deployed using agile development techniques and there is a gap. One that is easily filled by planning and adopting a logical approach to the needs of the business. We advise on how to deliver Smarter.BI application platform as a service backed up with a data-centric architecture to be both highly performant yet secure and compliant, complemented where necessary with tools from our #GreenStack.

At Differentia Consulting we recognise that to deliver Smarter.BI application platform as a service to a business like any other business application requires; a service delivery framework to be in place, the development/change life cycle to be understood and adopted to bridge the gap, and thirdly a level of assurance put in place to ensure that the service meets the needs of the business. We advise this certification* at three levels for a Smarter.BI application platform deployment;

1 Certify The Data (Quality/Lineage)

2 Certify The Process (Governance)

3 Certify The Output (Provenance)

*What do we mean by certification? Simply that there is a feedback mechanism in place to report on the well-being of the component being managed. Adopting exception management allows for the services to be governed in a less disruptive way thus ensuring maximum up-time compared to planned up-time. By monitoring, measuring and managing this way we can look to improve our business.

1 Certify The Data

Smarter.BI application platform …powered by Qlik feeds off data from one or multiple sources. Each of these data sources delivers data to the eventual output that is used to make better business decisions and thus it needs to be accurate and timely. Optimising data quality and data source management is just one element of delivering a Smarter.BI application platform …powered by Qlik as a service

2 Certify The Process

The business rules and business logic that drive the presentation of data that leads to better business decisions are based around the ability to provide what we call a certified process. The concept is simple and a matter of reverse-engineering the output to the feeds that create it. The requirements of scheduled data delivery/reload need to be understood and implemented in order to create the right data at the right time. As part of the service definition, we can continually improve the back-end processes that feed Smarter.BI applications and the management of the applications themselves by creating certified processes. Good governance is then required to manage.

3 Certify The Output

The final component is output validation. Whether Smarter.BI applications are deployed to the enterprise or locally to a department, our best practice would dictate that each and every Smarter.BI application has controls and exception reporting (integrity checking) in place to ensure that what the decision-maker is looking at is what the decision-maker should be looking at by way of meaningful intelligence. Further, we can trace each data element to its source provenance.

Architecture for an enterprise data-centric deployment of a Smarter.BI application platform …powered by Qlik, #GreenStack, with high availability, #HADMP.

Application Architecture, memory is the capacity constraint

Architecture is driven by many factors but one simple way is to understand the capacity of memory available to business users at any one time in a given location.  IT will provide capacity as memory and the business will consume it. That is the basic service.

Application Infrastructure, ability to meet service levels.

The challenge is to provide the infrastructure to an agreed level of need. Considerations for Performance + Availability (technology used to present Qlik to the consumers), Disaster Recovery, High Availability, also need to be considered and planned for. Data access is critical. If time to data is too high then we look to deploy a more performant architecture to reduce this time to deliver the business benefit. Eg using Analytics Databases.

Application Development; Agile + Waterfall

Pre and post-production release development standards will mean that agile development can be employed for discovery, alpha, prototyping, testing, and building of production Smarter.BI applications. Once deployed into production these applications by their nature become more static and as any change has a business impact this can be catered for by Waterfall development processes, to mitigate risk.

As part of any enterprise deployment of Smarter.BI application platform powered by Qlik Differentia Consulting will create a plan that encompasses all of the above. The professional services that we provide are meant to dovetail your need and help create the best possible business case and use scenario.
Differentia Consulting will help build the solution that is the service and assist in deploying all the components required to create a solution that meets the performance, and availability requirements of the services and the ongoing support of it. Covering full application life cycle management.