Qlik (NASDAQ: QLIK), a leader in data discovery, today announced that NHS North of England Commissioning Support Unit (NECS) is using its QlikView platform to provide a data analysis solution for health and wellbeing organisations across the North of England. With the solution, based on QlikView, Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) can analyse their data and get a more rounded view of patient situations in order to choose the right paths for treatment and, ultimately, improve care.

NECS is a Commissioning Support Unit (CSU) set up to provide a range of services and solutions to help GPs and clinicians improve outcomes for patients and healthcare for local communities. The CSU is based in the North of England and supports 13 Clinical Commissioning Groups across Teesside, Durham, Tyne and Wear and Cumbria. NECS is tasked with creating solutions that will help enhance the quality of healthcare across the region. It therefore wanted to move away from cumbersome, ad-hoc reporting processes, and bring together a ‘single version of the truth’ allowing users to drill down to gain intelligence from high level trends to detailed patient level data in order to make the best patient centred decisions.

With QlikView, it has created a Business Intelligence solution called RAIDR (Reporting Analysis and Intelligence Delivering Results), which has been developed with input from those who will actually use it, in particular GPs. Now they can use RAIDR to examine patient information and assess the best steps for providing the most appropriate level of patient care. Due to the intuitive QlikView interface, clinicians gain a better understanding of the treatments a patient has received to date. This can be anything from looking at the situation in which a patient has been discharged from hospital and taking steps to avoid re-admission, to seeing which patients are coming into A&E with minor ailments or signposting when patients could be receiving treatment or care at home or in the community.

Ian Davison, NECS Business Information Services Director said “We have created a tool which has received much praise for its power, speed, flexibility, usability, breadth and depth. The system is very flexible as it allows users to navigate, select and drill down to gain intelligence in a wide variety of ways, from high level trends to detailed patient data. A range of dashboards are included, covering the information and intelligence needs of GPs as commissioners and also for practice management.”

Although there are examples of innovation in the NHS, there are too few and there is a tendency to reinvent the wheel. NECS recognises that innovation is not just about ideas; it is the successful implementation of ideas. RAIDR was launched to GP practices in Newcastle, North Tyneside and Northumberland in 2010. Since then the project has raised a high level of interest across the rest of the country. Growth in the number of GP practices using RAIDR has been exponential, within the next few months 20% of all practices across England will have licences to use RAIDR. Other CSUs are now interested in reselling RAIDR in order to fulfil a need from GP practices in their locality.

“Knowing that QlikView is being used to improve healthcare across large regions of the country is a great testament to the value of being able to truly understand data,” said Sean Farrington, Qlik UK & Ireland MD and RVP Northern Europe. “NECS has developed a truly innovative solution around our platform that harnesses patient data to help GPs help their patients – and knowing that their work is likely to spread further is a real testament to how much QlikView is helping to drive top notch patient care.”

Follow @DataconomyMedia

Image Credit: Qlik

Everyone has data. But it’s how you use your data that makes a difference. Come to our Visualise Your World event, and you’ll learn everything you need to know to visualise your data and find insights that matter.

Highlights of this year’s event include:

• Big thinkers: Industry experts share their perspectives on hot topics such as data visualisation, big data, and data governance in keynotes and breakout sessions
• Transformational discoveries: Qlik® customers tell stories about how they uncovered meaningful insights that changed their business
• Meaningful connections: Qlik customers, partners, and experts gather to share ideas, solutions, and best practices

And if that’s not enough, you’ll also experience Qlik Sense™, our new self-service data visualisation application that lets you explore your data, ask questions, and follow your intuition. With Sense, anyone can intuitively drag, drop, and visualise data. It’s really that easy. Come see for yourself.

Register Here

Follow @DataconomyMedia

Press Release: Qlik, a leader in data discovery, today introduced general availability of Qlik Sense, the first device-independent, self-service visualization and discovery product engineered for enterprise-class governance and performance. Built on a modern architecture and powered by the patented, industry-proven Qlik data indexing engine, Qlik Sense gives users the unrestricted ability to create personalized data analyses and explore the relationships that exist in data to reveal connections instantly. Qlik Sense is designed to serve audiences equally without compromise: business users gain the intuitive experience they need, developers gain boundless possibilities for what they can create and IT gains centralized control for management and governance.

Just as Qlik disrupted the business intelligence (BI) industry to pioneer the data discovery category, the company is now leading the next transformation as the category matures to governed, user-driven creation with the launch of Qlik Sense. According to Gartner, Inc.’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform report, “By 2015, enterprise buyers of BI platforms will predominantly purchase platforms that support both strong and broad business-user-accessible data discovery capabilities and IT-driven enterprise features for data reuse, governance, security and scalability.”

“Our vision for Qlik Sense builds on our belief that anyone in an organization should be able to easily create dynamic dashboards to explore their data to uncover meaningful insights,” said Lars Björk, Qlik CEO. “When we set out to create Qlik Sense, we envisioned a world where every knowledge worker, from any device, could rapidly create visually rich analytics to explore theories, prove hypothesis, or discover new trends that can change the trajectory of their business.”

“We have been very impressed with Qlik Sense so far. For us, simplicity of delivery is key, and it allows us to accelerate the delivery of actionable analytics to the right people at the right time,” said Perry Willis, Head of Information Technology EMEA at Colliers International. “Although we have strong QlikView skills in the IT team, so creation of applications is easy, Qlik Sense allows even greater creation flexibility so we can do more, faster. The synergy we are rapidly developing by using both QlikView and Qlik Sense is helping us provide our Real Estate advisors across 40 countries in EMEA smarter analytics solutions.”

Qlik Sense is the first offering to deliver self-service BI based on a server-side development and distribution model. Whereas most products require separate developer licenses and leverage the traditional approach of develop and publish, Qlik Sense empowers every user with the full capability to create, customize, or extend visualizations from any device, at any point in time.

“The problem with self-service BI has always been that you either get rich BI capability with weak usability, or a very approachable product with limited analysis capability,” said Anthony Deighton, Qlik CTO and Senior Vice President of Products. “With Qlik Sense, we set out to change that. That’s why we built Qlik Sense on the second generation of our patented associative data indexing engine, but gave it a rich, modern visualization front-end that is intuitive, yet powerful.”

Smart Search and Smart Visualizations Accelerate Time to Insight
Qlik Sense lets users create apps through a drag-and-drop experience that delivers relevant analysis, interactive reports, and dashboards critical to decision-making and operations. Users can freely explore their intuition since they are not limited to predefined paths they must follow or questions they must formulate ahead of time. The Qlik associative data indexing engine allows users to easily expose relationships among data dimensions, uncovering insights that would have been hidden in traditional hierarchical, query-based data models. This provides users with the freedom to explore data at any point in their analysis.

Smart Search allows a user to simply type words or numbers to begin analysis of a data set. When a user types in a search string, Smart Search connects the dots, uncovering data relationships and information in locations that might otherwise be unnoticed. In addition, intuitive Smart Visualizations uncover all the relationships between data dimensions, revealing insights that would have been hidden in traditional data models. These cues help users explore patterns by dynamically updating and highlighting new information and associations.

Anytime, Anywhere Collaboration Enables Broader Knowledge Sharing
Qlik Sense puts the social and collaborative experience front and center. Workgroups and teams can collaborate by collectively sharing analyses anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Its touch-driven interface and responsive design automatically adapts visualizations for the best possible experience on any device.

Data Storytelling allows multiple users, on any device to share their insights at a point in time in presentation format. Users can add commentary and narrative and drill down directly from the presentation to Qlik Sense to answer questions on the fly. This helps to drive communication of insight and facilitates group discovery.

Enterprise-Class Governance and Security Provides Centralized Control
With Qlik Sense, users can build their own visualizations from a centralized library of pre-built data sets, expressions, and visualizations to ensure consistent use of data and values. Its modern architecture allows new capabilities for governance and manageability to support workgroup and distributed enterprise environments, including license allocation and usage monitoring in an easy-to-use interface that saves time and simplifies troubleshooting. It also enables IT to implement enterprise-level security requirements with a flexible security-rules engine that offers granular control for progressive development with powerful audit and logging.

In addition, Qlik Sense supports robust data integration to transform and combine multiple, disparate data sources and provide seamless analysis across them, including fast calculations, associative exploration, and search. Its open and powerful APIs give developers the ability to embed Qlik Sense into web pages and custom applications, and extend core capabilities to meet custom needs.

Availability and Pricing
Qlik Sense is available today. The Company has also introduced a new, more flexible token-based licensing model for Qlik Sense to provide greater flexibility for license management. Qlik Sense tokens can be allocated to named users, or leveraged across multiple login sessions for one or more users. With the token-based licensing model, customers can deploy multiple servers, across multiple geographies, to optimize for performance and availability without paying any additional costs. For more pricing information, contact Qlik or one of its registered partners.

In addition to offering the complete Qlik Sense offering for interactive visualization, Qlik will continue to offer its market-proven platform, QlikView®, to provide application development that enables analysts with minimal development expertise to build and publish powerful analytical applications. Qlik Sense Desktop, will also continue to be available as a free download.

(Image Credit: Qlik)

Our three part Business Intelligence series has looked at the key developments in BI from the 1960’s all the way to the late 1990’s.

In the first edition, we focused on the way data storage changed from hierarchical database management systems (DBMS), like IBM’s IMS in the 60’s, to network DMBS’s and then to relational database management systems (RDMBS) in the late 70’s.

The second part of the series investigated the technological advancements through the 80’s and 90’s, predominantly mapping the evolution from mainframes to personal computers, DBMS’s to RDBM’s, and the emergence of new methods and tools like Data Warehousing, Extract Transform Load (ETL), and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP).

In this edition, we will take a brief look at how BI transitioned from a tool based, IT-centric activity, to one that is now accessible to technical and non-technical users alike.

The transformation of BI 1.0.

BI 1.0 refers to an era of BI that existed through the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. With the advent and development of data warehousing, SQL, ETL and OLAP, data was consolidated into a unified system and queries could be written to extract data from many tables at once, ultimately helping companies access and store their data more effectively.

At its core, BI 1.0. could be distilled into two components: data and reports, or aggregation and presentation. As Neil Raden, Principal Analyst at HiredBrains Research commented, “most of the effort in BI…[was] focused on data integration, data quality, data cleansing, data warehouse, data mart, data modelling, data governance, data stewardship.”

However, within this period, the major problem with BI projects was that they were still owned by IT departments, data was siloed, and reports often took extended periods of time to be delivered to management. BI solutions were predominantly designed for an analytics-trained minority and those who were already capable of understanding data models.

BI 2.0 and the Influence of Web 2.0: Mid-2000’s

The mid-late 2000’s marked a significant step forward for BI as it entered its acclaimed 2.0 phase; it went far beyond simple data and reporting by integrating near real-time processing, collaboration, self-service, discoverability, as well as offline and online access.

Whereas BI 1.0 centered mostly around the refinement of different tools – the aforementioned data warehouse, OLAP, and ETL technologies – BI 2.0 focused mostly on using the connectivity of the Web to create a BI environment that would encourage access, flexibility and getting the right data to the right people.

Many of these changes were influenced by the direction that the Web began to take in the early 2000’s (often dubbed “Web 2.0”) with social networking and web applications. One significant example was the arrival of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and even Google, where the consumer became an important source of critique – anyone could exchange opinions on widely accessible sites, as well as gain instant information on competitors.

Businesses in the mid-2000’s therefore required access to immense amounts of real-time information in order to, among other things, track customers’ reactions to their products, what their competitors were offering, and, with the advancement of mobile and tablet technologies, the best interfaces on which to approach their consumers. In other words, the “new” Web environment demanded a simultaneous reconstitution of BI technologies that emphasized agility, dynamism, and immediacy.

BI 2.5 and the Democratization of Data: 2000’s – Current

After this explosion of data throughout the 2000’s, businesses in our current environment now require visualization tools – interactive dashboards, bar graphs, animations – to effectively analyse the information coming from inside and outside of the organization. BI is becoming jointly governed by IT and business users themselves, and is aimed at empowering the ‘Data Explorer’ through content delivery and creation.  The emergence of visualisation tools and other techniques means that BI uptake across the organisation is rising, essentially empowering business users  with the ability to independently explore their data.

Everyone from huge IT companies like Oracle, IBM, SAP, SAS, Microsoft, as well as other

companies like Tableau, Birst, Qlikview, Tibco Jaspersoft, SiSense (the list continues), are all competing to make data easier to store, more accessible across devices, and processable at a speed like never before.

As such, the battle between BI companies today is to provide speed, affordability, and high capacity storage. With mobile technology and PC’s generating such incredible amounts of data – estimated at 2.5 quintillion bytes a day — companies are no longer looking for access alone. Rather, the data has to be accessed in breakneck speeds across all devices, instantly analysable and stored in a cost effective manner.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the BI market is expected to reach $20.8 billion by 2018, at an estimated CAGR of 8.3%, of which $4 billion is expected to come from cloud-based BI. The same goes for data visualisation, with forecasts suggesting the market will grow at a CAGR of 9.21% to reach $6.40 billion by 2019.

Whether BI is set to enter yet another phase – BI 3.0? – and what it will look like is as yet undetermined. But as Brian Gentile suggests, the fierce competition among BI vendors may already have reached its tipping point:

“We joke about it inside TIBCO Jaspersoft ‘here’s the new competitor of the week’. Everyone apparently thinks that they can do analytics because that’s what it looks like. While this will clearly generate some good ideas, not all these companies are going to make it. Many of them are going to fail, or be acquired, and so on along the path.”

With this in mind, the History of Business Intelligence series has come to a conclusion. However, we will now look at dispelling the myths around BI, compare vendors against one another and offer guidance as to which technologies are right for your specific business needs.

Follow @DataconomyMedia

Furhaad Shah – Editor

Furhaad worked as a researcher/writer for The Times of London and is a regular contributor for the Huffington Post. He studied philosophy on a dual programme with the University of York (U.K.) and Columbia University (U.S.) He is a native of London, United Kingdom.

Email: furhaad@dataconomy.ru

Interested in more content like this? Sign up to our newsletter, and you wont miss a thing!

[mc4wp_form]

(Image Credit: M.A. Cabrera Luengo)

PREVIOUS ENTRIES:

The History of BI: The 1960′s and 70′s

This is the first edition to a three part series and gives a brief overview of the history of business intelligence. Starting in the 1960’s and 70’s, the article looks at the advancements made in data storage, database management systems, and companies that were pioneering BI from the early stages.

The History of BI: The 1960′s and 70′s

The second edition of our business intelligence series takes a deeper look at the transition from DBMS’s to RDBM’s, and the emergence of Data Warehousing, ETL, and OLAP. The 1980’s and 90’s were revolutionary in many aspects for BI, and ultimately transformed the way businesses extracted value from their data.