Earlier this fall, I was working with one of Wipfli’s QlikView developers at a client site when we found ourselves with a few extra minutes before I was to meet with the client’s CIO. I had hatched an idea many months ago that I really wanted to explore, and I finally had a few minutes to go off the beaten path with QlikView and do some “tinkering.” I can’t get into all the details right now, but the crux of the issue I was trying to address was to find a way to leverage QlikView to complete some more statistically savvy correlation analysis. The premise of the idea is based on the fact that many times a business analyst or leader does not have a hypothesis as to “why” a certain KPI is trending negatively. If you do have a hypothesis as to why things are slipping, QlikView has got to be the fastest, easiest BI tool to prove or disprove your hypothesis. However, what do you do when you have run out of hypotheses? Correlation analysis can be just the thing to help identify hypotheses you never thought of before.
To make a long story short, the developer and I were able to leverage QlikView to bring some important client data together and then we ran some correlation analysis on the data to identify key dimensions that positively or negatively impacted the designated expression in our data set. This was cool stuff...don’t ask what I do in my spare time! Anyway, we finished this right before my meeting with the client CIO. So when I walked into his office, I had to share what we had just been able to do. The CIO put his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair, formed a wry smile on his face and said, “We just don’t have enough intellectual curiosity around this place.” He was both proud and convicting at the same time.
This got me thinking…scary, I know. Could QlikView be the organizational catalyst to start a groundswell of intellectual curiosity? Could a business intelligence technology tool actually change a culture? As I considered this particular client organization, I started to realize that their legacy report-driven BI environment has likely stifled individuals’ intellectual curiosity. Some of you may remember a blog post I did a while back called “The Quiet Corporate Addiction.” Well, the addiction that I wrote about was the addiction to reports. An addiction to reports can lead to what I call “death by reports” where the “death” is actually that of intellectual curiosity. Think about it (no pun intended)…if the intellectually curious staff members at a company are only able to get information via a series of static reports, their curiosity can only be fed by waiting for a subsequent report that may (or may not) have the answer to their curious question. If you have to wait days, weeks, or months to get the next report, how long will you remain actively intellectually curious? My guess is that such an environment ultimately crushes any movements around intellectual curiosity. Their best bet is to start grabbing data from different reports and analyzing it themselves in Excel. Have you seen this movie before?
This is just plain sad. Clearly, a broken BI environment has got to make life just that much more miserable for the business analyst who trudges forward trying to stay intellectually curious in a broken system. I have seen many companies where the analysts don’t really analyze anything. They simply spend time taking data from multiple static reports and consolidate and aggregate the data in spreadsheets. Talk about a waste of time and talent.
So what’s the answer? Well, I haven’t done a formal research study, but I can start to make the argument that QlikView absolutely cannot make things worse for the intellectually curious. In fact, I would say that the 96% customer satisfaction score that QlikView gets is partly due to the fact that QlikView literally removes the shackles that tie down the intellectually curious. QlikTech likes to call it “off-roading” with the data. I call it becoming intellectually curious. Either way, it’s a good thing.
So let me wrap this up by saying I believe it is possible that QlikView can help re-invigorate a culture of intellectual curiosity. It has not necessarily happened on a broad scale with every client, but I have seen it start in some way, shape, or form at nearly all our clients. For those of you who are intellectually curious, keep up the good work. For those of you who know some company whose culture could use a boost of intellectual curiosity, maybe QlikView is just the thing to get started.
Until next time…Shawn