What has been on my mind lately, and something that justifies my spending some time getting back on board, has been the urge to contribute. Sharing my journey and ideas in the world of data visualisation and analytics was the reason for starting to write and blog in the first place. I'll be the first to admit that it was with some ulterior purposes as well and at the time I started this I was in the software sales industry. Sadly, it made me push out the ideas of what my products could do somewhat beyond what was actually possible. In any case I had lofty ambitions for that firm and I wish them all the best, but deep down it is still a joy to me to be able to pick and choose tools with the freedom that comes from being on the customer side instead of the other end.
Anyway, enough ramble, time for more grunt.
I've finally wrapped my head around Qlik Sense and it's capabilities and am well on the journey forward. They'e done so much more to the product in their latest iteration (version 3.0) and it's meant that we could finally move away from Qlikview and adopt it in our data services to clients. The key to this has been the way that they've made it easier to create your own journeys with the way you can build a dashboard or visual or web page. Qlikview (the old product) has always been to me, the Swisse army knife of the Business Intelligence (BI) industry. Not always flashy, not always the easiest tool to use, but the most capable all rounder. Qlik Sense is turning into just that tool as well an potentially even more so.
With Qlikview you had the ability to build pixel-perfect style applications but the platform was stuck in the past. This was mainly due to the limitations of the underlying build (C++) and with other products on the market becoming more HTML5 friendly, something had to give. Qlik Sense has finally gotten to the stage where it's easy for those who know a bit of Javascript, HTML and CSS to be able to build a page full of interactive visuals based on Qlik Sense.
"Success comes from standing on the shoulders of giants." This is an often heard quote that I pay homage to every day in the work I do. For my success its been all about learning by copying and hacking apart existing builds that have elements I want to use and by trial and error I come out on the other end with continually improving products.
Our old product looked like this:
The ability was there to place objects wherever you wanted and some quite innovative popups could be made using hide/show capabilities but ultimately the key issues with "old" Qlikview was its inability to incorporate new technology. For example, the inability of this product to automatically switch between being desktop friendly to mobile meant that if you wanted to run off two devices you needed 2 versions. Forget about building for both. What would be more annoying to a user that opens up the page on their mobile only to have to zoom in to portions of the page at a time OR to the desktop user who has your visualisation show up on only a portion of their screen size. Not good!
Qlik Sense on the other hand is built as a webpage. The 'app' if you can really call it that has the technology in place that means I was able to load it up on an Amazon server (AWS) and do the edits from any browser without having to install the product on multiple desktops. Sure this means that I can't work whilst I'm on a flight (unless I port everything onto my desktop) but that's easy enough to setup and it forces me to be able to relax and enjoy something else like a good book or a Bloody Mary.
Because it's built as a webpage it means that moving from desktop to mobile is easy as the product scales to fit the size of your screen. Here's an example of the desktop version in widescreen layout:
and here's what happens if you change the browser size to be thinner (like on a mobile):
It automatically scales!
How cool is that. I write no code, I adjust no settings, it just does it. Now that is smart!
Anyway it also means that innovations like Tableau 10's ability to choose what your app looks like on different screen sizes (but not automatically) look somewhat dated. Granted, Tableau is an amazing tool especially if you're new to the game of BI, but the the king for me in the work I do, is still Qlik.
One more thing before I go which is interesting as I dive deeper into the world of data science is the ability to connect R server with Qlik Sense and integrate forecasting methods that used to be performed by running analysis in one product, passing it to the next for further analysis and then back into another visual tool to produce results. Cumbersome at times, this inability to automate did mean a lot of analysts were limited in what they could do. Now I can hook up my visuals to my database and to an R server and run advanced forecasting (in this case ARIMA) to 'predict' the direction of data I care about.
Anyway, enough for tonight. Stay tuned for more in the next few days.
PS. Anyone interested in Qlik should take a look, not just at the usual marketing spiel you get from the companies homepage, but also at the blogs of their users.
http://www.askqv.com/ - is a great source of the best of these blogs and something I visit to keep up to date quite often.
Also there is - http://branch.qlik.com/#!/ - this is the place where a lot of further extending of the product occurs. Instead of just being able to use what comes out of the box with Qlik, the community of developers has contributed to creating further capabilities for the Sense product that go well beyond what the product developers could ever do. It is brilliant as you get contributions from a variety of sources around the globe and its a melting pot of ideas.
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