The QlikView.Next project

Given these points, Qlik took the decision to disrupt itself and the market again. It decided to design and develop a next generation data discovery platform. Developed under the project name QlikView.Next and launched as Qlik Sense, the product was anchored to five themes:

• Gorgeous and genius: Within this theme Qlik focused on three product scenarios, with an overall emphasis on ad hoc analysis. The scenarios were that the product should be visually beautiful, support associative, comparative, and anticipatory analysis, and offer one client to rule them all—a seamless experience across all devices.

• Mobility with agility: This theme was about all users having access and the ability to answer new analytical questions as they arise in new situations and contexts when using a mobile device, with no difference between static and mobile experiences.

• Compulsive collaboration: Business intelligence and collaboration are inseparable; decision-making is, by nature, a collaborative activity. The intent was to build a product that could reside at the forefront of users' shared decision-making and give them the chance to communicate their insights through collaboration and storytelling.

• The premier platform: This theme was about enabling Qlik customers and partners to quickly and easily deliver apps and solutions that are perfectly relevant to their constituents. Within this theme, Qlik focused on four scenarios: data access, the development experience, expanding its ecosystem through broadened APIs, and offering a unified platform interface.

• Enabling new enterprise: With this theme, Qlik was focused on making capabilities such as security, reliability, and scalability available to all customers, not just the largest ones, and giving administrators and authors the same kind of gorgeous and genius experience other users get.

Making sense of modern business

You may say, "Well, that's all good but it doesn't really tell me why this matters or why Qlik Sense is important."

To answer this, we have to think about what the focus of technology in our organizations has been in the recent past. For 25 years, most of our investment in IT has been on effectively improving reliability, using ERP or transactional applications to streamline processes, drive out inefficiencies, and deliver our products or services effectively. However, if most organizations, and particularly groups of competitors, are now operating at similar levels of procedural effectiveness, a key question arises: what do we do differently to win?

The answer lies in out-thinking our competitors through the use of data and analysis. This requires a shift of focus in both how we run our businesses and the IT world needed to do so. So far, analytics has too often been a poor cousin, something that happens afterwards on the edges, a tactical rather than strategic activity. That's no longer good enough. Businesses using data-driven decision-making perform measurably better than those that don't. When we can see (and measure) new things, we are driven to seek answers and thus, new ways of thinking and operating. Organizations that do not have analytics as a central part of their business activities will not thrive or even survive in the new reality.

Qlik Sense is about doing exactly that; freeing up the analytic skills of individuals in organizations, whatever their role. This book shows you how to make the most of that and alter how your organization uses information.