QlikView Business Discovery – A Platform for Business Analyst & App Developer

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Today many top organizations are using QlikView to grow rapidly. QlikView, unlike the traditional BI solutions, provides a flexible and user-friendly platform for analysis to each and every user across the enterprise.

In this QlikView tutorial, we are going to study the features and benefits offered by QlikView Business Discovery. Along with this, we will also cover how QlikView is beneficial for business users, business analysts and App developers. So, let’s traverse the QlikView Business Discovery Platform.

What is Business Discovery?

Business Discovery enables users to come up with new questions by analyzing the data and making unique discoveries. Such new questions, insights, and discoveries serve as a building block to new innovations in business. Now, you must be wondering is business intelligence and business discovery the same?

Well, no. Business intelligence is a traditional way of conducting business analysis where the solution only provides new answers to the same set of questions or queries. Whereas, the business discovery platform provides new questions and hence, new answers and insights into the available data.

For example, a business intelligence-oriented approach to data analysis will be finding out the top 10 customers every month or every year or finding the highest selling/grossing product i.e. a standard set of questions.

Whereas in a business discovery approach, you dig deeper, you would ask new questions, as to why some customers perform better than the others, what kind of products make it to the best-selling list consistently, etc. Hence, it pushes employees toward making new discoveries and innovations that enhance the business.

QlikView Business Discovery Platform

Now that we have understood the concept of business discovery, let us learn how QlikView fits the frame of a good business discovery platform perfectly. QlikView, unlike the traditional BI solutions, provides a flexible and user-friendly platform for analysis to each and every user across the enterprise.

This is by virtue of QlikView business discovery that data is accessible for analysis to all the departments and levels in an organization. Which is not the case in traditional business intelligence approach, where only a small group of IT technicians are involved in analyzing and drawing insights from data.

Thus, in QlikView, all the users have the freedom to conduct an analysis of data and make discoveries individually. The associative QIX engine of QlikView is the core of the tool, provides dynamic views on QlikView apps that change as per the context and relevance of the information searched and selected.

Multiple users can individually drill-down into data in their own ways and draw meaningful insights. The data is compressed by the QlikView engine to accommodate it into the in-memory from where it is fetched by the users at a very fast rate.

If data is too large to fit into the in-memory, then the user is directly connected to the data source to conduct data discovery. Thus, the QlikView business discovery approach the empowers an enterprise or organization and assures positive outcomes by simplifying, optimizing, and streamlining the decision-making process through efficient data analysis.

Features of QlikView Business Discovery

The key features of QlikView in the role of a business discovery platform are listed in this section.

1. A social and transformative business discovery platform enabling every single user to follow their gut while analyzing data.

2. Real-time decisions and data insights can be made by a group of users who can come together and analyze the same set of data or analyze a single app in “co-browsing sessions”.

3. Users can search across all the available data in QlikView data model to find as well share their discoveries with others.

4. Apps can be sorted and marked as favorite depending upon individual user’s requirements and motive.

5. Users get to select from a wide range of visualizations to represent the data and pictorially analyze the data and trends.

6. Users can remix and reassemble data from multiple and varied data sources and use it in a single app to attain a broader sense of understanding of the data and the insight it reveals.

7. Session collaboration is a unique collaborative feature where a QlikView user, conducting analysis can invite other (authorized or non-authorized) users and share the apps or prepared documents with them via a URL. They can participate in the decision-making process by connecting with the QlikView user through a web browser and make discoveries in data themselves.

Benefits of Business Discovery in QlikView

Let’s discuss together the advantages of QlikView Business Discovery-

1.  Interactive apps

The associative data engine of QlikView makes the apps interactive as a user never loses the relevance and context of analysis no matter how deep they go into the data layers. Also, these interactions happen quickly and on-the-fly.

2. Social & collaborative

Users can share data, reports, documents, and apps across individual users, workgroups and departments to collectively make discoveries.

Users can share data as important information and insights through a secure network and even collaborate with other organizations. This enhances decision-making as a large business network means more discoveries and more innovations.

3. Mobility

QlikView being an agile business discovery platform supports mobile platforms such as Apple iOS and Android devices (tablets and phones). Users can conveniently use live data and make decisions based on real-time analysis on the go.

4. Informed decision-making

The QlikView business discovery enables the users to share bookmarks, documents, in-app notes and collaborate with other users socially for insight sharing, discussions, debates, dialogues based on real-time analysis.

This brings out the best possible outcome of data analysis as collaboration ensures informed and well-thought decision-making for future steps and investments in a business.

5. Better app models

QlikView app models are good as they are easy-to-use, easy-to-create, purpose-specific, task-specific analytical apps which make data analysis simple for everyone without needing technical training.

You can develop a personalized app, solely based on the purpose of analysis having only the relevant piece of data as information provided in those apps.

QlikView for Business Users

The business users usually interact with two types of clients; QlikView browser clients and QlikView mobile clients.

1. QlikView Browser Clients

The business users connect to QlikView applications using Ajax clients or Microsoft Internet Explorer plug-ins. These client platforms are browser-independent and run on a QlikView Server. You can perform all the usual analytical tasks such as;

  • Making selections, creating visualizations, manipulate charts, list, etc.
  • Make use of associations between tables and data fields in the analysis.
  • Carry out direct/indirect, global/local searches on data fields.
  • In-app thread discussions enabling group of users to analyze data and make a decision. These discussion threads can also be referred to later.
  • Business partners, stakeholders, and customers can take part in real-time analysis collectively. This improves collaboration.
  • Users can be updated about any changes made in QlikView apps connected via the single QlikView Server.

2. QlikView Mobile Clients

QlikView mobile clients enable users to do business discovery from anywhere in the world using your mobile device. QlikView mobile support Apple and Android devices. All the QlikView apps that are used on mobile devices are run via the QlikView Server.

Business discovery using mobile platforms provides features such as interactive analysis, data association, live data access, and search. Users can take advantage of mobile finger gestures, security, scalability, and ease of use of a mobile device.

QlikView mobile comes with full analytical functionalities and you can use it on small-screen devices like mobile phones or on big-screen devices such as iPads. There is a special feature of offline views of data for users using QlikView on iPad.

QlikView for Business Analysts and App Developers

The app developers and business analysts mainly use software such as QlikView Desktop and QlikView Workbench to develop QlikView applications. Further, these apps are connected to data sources using data connectors. Let us explore more about application development platforms and data connectors in the sections given below.

1. QlikView Desktop

QlikView Desktop is a Windows application, which can use by BI app developers and business analysts as a BI platform. QlikView Desktop is a convenient platform for data integration from multiple data sources, data transformation and data analysis for an enterprise.

  • It guarantees data and user security, provides multi-tabbed and multi-user apps.
  • Users can easily create prototypes and conduct test runs of an app with the desired data.
  • App developers and business analysts can use QlikView Desktop for analytics by extracting and transforming raw data into meaningful information. Using the transformed data, analysts can create dashboards and reports for analysis.
  • The QV Desktop provides a lot of visualizations ranging from in-built, customized to third-party visualizations. Users can select from these different types and use the visualizations in their apps for proper data representation.
  • Desktop software also leverages on associative capabilities of QlikView. The apps created via GUI or SQL scripts function according to the associations between data tables.

2. QlikView Workbench

QlikView Workbench is a Microsoft Visual Studio platform used to create web-based QlikView extensions. It is a software plug-in, which can use along with main QlikView tools. To make QlikView extensions in workbench, you can use functionalities of QlikView’s API and Visual Studio template.

QlikView Workbench is a drag-and-drop web integration platform which is used to create powerful QlikView extensions. In addition to the efficient toolkit provided to built extensions, a user can also integrate QlikView apps into websites or Window apps.

3. QlikView Data Connectors

An essential process to create and work with QlikView apps is to be able to import data in it. QlikView supports multiple processes to extract data from different kinds of data sources. Also, a user can use connection capabilities to connect to popular business platforms.

  • QlikView supports standard data extraction processes using ODBC and XML.
  • Connectivity to non-standard sources such as Google BigQuery and import data in QVX format files.
  • Direct connectivity to SQL- complaint data sources support which call as QlikView Direct Discovery. In such direct connections, extracted data is temporarily kept in QlikView’s in memory. Originally, data stays at the data source.
  • Using QlikView data connectors, users can connect to business applications and platforms such as SAP NetWeaver, Salesforce.com, Informatica etc.
a. QlikView connector for SAP NetWeaver®

QlikView provides a data connector for SAP users using SAP NetWeaver®. Data from different SAP platforms such as SAP® R/3®, mySAP™, SAP BW, etc. combine with the data in QlikView to carry out an analysis.

In addition to this, users can also use these connectors to connect to non-SAP sources. By combining data from QlikView and SAP systems, users can conduct instant, ad-hoc user-driven analysis.

In addition to easy connectivity capabilities QlikView offers for SAP NetWeaver, QlikView provides QlikStart templates for several SAP modules.

The SAP modules supported by QlikView are Sales and Distribution (SD), Materials Management (MM), Production Planning (PP), General Ledger (GL), Project Systems (PS), Human Resources (HR), Controlling (CO), and Finance (Account Receivable (AR) and Accounts Payable (AP). This makes module-specific analysis in QlikView very convenient.

b. QlikView Connector for Salesforce.com

The QlikView connector for Salesforce.com connects QlikView apps with Salesforce.com. The Salesforce.com connector in QlikView is available as a free add-on for users. QlikView developers and business analysts use data taken from Salesforce.com for analysis and creating reports.

Users can use the Salesforce.com connector from any QlikView app that is running on a QlikView Server.

c. QlikView connector for Informatica

The QlikView connector for Informatica platform allows organizations to easily analyze their data and processes in the Informatica data warehouse. Informatica offers Informatica data warehouses to manage single data sources. Use data warehouses to meet compliance and government guidelines or requirements.

QlikView makes the work of Informatica easy by letting the Informatica data read directly into QlikView (using QVX files). Organizations then use the imported data to gain insights into data and take important decisions.

4. QlikView Direct Discovery

QlikView Direct Discovery is a unique feature available in QlikView 11.2. It enables a user to directly connect to big data sources such as Cloudera Impala, Google BigQuery, Teradata Integrated Data Warehouse, etc. That is, you can connect to any SQL-based data source through QlikView Direct Discovery.

Direct discovery also allows users to combine data from big data repositories and in-memory storage of QlikView in a single QlikView app.

The result of the analysis done on data fetched from big data sources is cached in QlikView’s in-memory for future use. Users can very easily conduct detailed analytical operations on hybrid data models on-premise or on-cloud with mobile devices.

Conclusion

This brings our discussion on QlikView business discovery platform to an end. We hope you liked the explanation. Do leave your comments below if you have any suggestions or queries.

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