Business Discovery Frees IT to Focus on Its Core Competencies

I recently blogged about a presentation Donald Farmer (QlikView product advocate) did at one of the stops on the Business Discovery Tour. (See related blog post, “Donald Farmer’s Take on Business Discovery.”) We’ve got another person’s perspective to share with you; we also recorded a talk that Doug Laird, QlikTech’s VP of global marketing, did at the California stop on the road show. (Click here to watch the video.)

A comment I received on one of my recent blog posts (see the article, “Donald Farmer: ‘Follow the Leaders to Successful Mobile BI’”) reminded me of the need to shine more light on the role of IT in Business Discovery. Doug touched on this a bit in his talk. He made the points that:

• In a report-centric BI world, IT’s burden is huge. In traditional, stack-based BI, the role of IT includes creating data models, establishing a semantic layer, building reports, and tightly controlling data. Sometimes IT works with small teams of business analysts to create analysis. At any rate, it’s a small pipe of people creating information for the organization.
• With Business Discovery, IT is free to focus on its core competencies. With Business Discovery, IT continues to focus on data preparation and governance. IT assembles data, delivers relevant data, enables self-service BI, and ensures security and scalability. What fundamentally shifts the game is that the business users are now creating the analysis. (See the related blog post, “Self-Service BI: Power to ALL the People.”)

Part of the power of Business Discovery is that it’s not just a few people who are creating analysis—it’s many people.  This can have a profound impact on the performance of the organization. But don’t take it from me. Here are links to download a few customer success stories and case studies that highlight the value of self-service BI: Avnet, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Fonsenca Hospital.