An organisation is a collaborative effort by its very nature. Each individual in an organisation brings his or her experiences, talents, and skills toward a common mission and goals. Together, this collective effort has the potential to solve more difficult problems and achieve more than any individual could do on their own.
Collaboration is central to the human experience. We are born to families and have long banded together in communities. We are programmed to collaborate. And, of course, innovation inherently benefits from more than one view of the problem to be solved. So, it is no surprise that collaboration is a critical factor in ensuring your organisation is able to extract the most value from your business intelligence (BI) and data investments.
Qlik Sense creates a collaborative community around data, ensuring that everyone both benefits from and is able to contribute to the collective wisdom of the organisation. Here’s how it’s done:
Streams/Spaces
The first step in collaboration is to ensure that individuals are able to find content that has been made available to them so they can explore and contribute. Streams organise Qlik Sense visualisation apps into logical communities. These could represent organisational departments or even projects. As new content is made available to the community, it appears in the appropriate stream making it easy for everyone in the community to find and benefit from the new content.
In addition, each user has a separate stream for their personal ad-hoc content, ensuring there is a clear separation between personal and trusted enterprise content.
Content Libraries
Groups are able to accomplish more together by empowering each individual to build upon the work of others. Libraries provide a way for those responsible for managing the data to make it available to others in a way that makes it easier to use. But libraries include more than just data. Measures can be added to the library to ensure that everyone has a common definition for calculated results. And, even visualisations can be added to the library for easy reuse by others.
Collaborative Creation
Traditional BI is based on the idea that technical experts – usually IT – provide content to the business users based on requirements understood in advance. In reality, this rarely works well. Analytical requirements are usually not well understood until the individuals closest to the business have had a chance to explore and gain insight into how data can benefit their work. Qlik Sense enables individuals to easily build upon foundational content provided by others. This ensures that the visual data analysis can be tailored to fit any business need.
The ability for individuals to create their own content has the added benefit of giving the business users the tools they need to experiment and innovate with new ideas. And, when those ideas prove valuable, Qlik Sense enables new content to be published to the entire community ensuring that innovation is captured and shared.
Data Storytelling
Story telling is as inherent to the human experience as collaboration. We see this from ancient humans passing down stories in an effort to share the wisdom of the ages, to the stories we share with each other as we build a sense of family, culture, and community.
In business, storytelling provides a way to create common understandings, to support decisions, and to influence others. However, data on its own does not make a compelling story. Similarly, the insights of a single individual cannot inspire others without a way to share it. The data story telling feature in Qlik Sense provides a way to convert insights into a compelling story – propelling it into organisational wisdom and innovation.
Since data story telling is an embedded part of Qlik Sense, the question of data lineage isn’t an issue.
Throughout data stories, users can add visual effects, commentary, and images to data visualisations. This enables the presenter to highlight various points and provide context as the story guides the viewer through the analysis. Visualisations are linked directly to the original analysis, allowing the viewer to move seamlessly between the full analysis and the data story as unforeseen questions arise. And, once a story becomes part of the fabric of the organisation, it can be retained as a living history of the story used to educate, decide, or innovate.
Any questions? Please feel free to contact us!
Kind Regards,
The Insight Consulting Team