QlikView

Data is the Fuel for the Automotive Industry

As an avid auto enthusiast, I’m always amazed to see the innovations that the auto industry is bringing to the highways these days. However, have you ever taken a step back for a moment to see what kinds of new things are coming to the market? Auto makers have pretty much nailed how to make a car accelerate, corner and brake with confidence and their styling is leaps and bounds above what it used to be. So, what do they seem to be focusing on more so these days?

Dynamic User Built Charts

In the past I have run into situations where a project requires a chart to be “user driven” and the users have limited knowledge on how to create the charts they want. So I decided to pre-build a chart that would allow users to simply select the Dimensions and Expressions they need, which eliminated the need for them to create the charts.

In this post I have created a basic example of how some simple Inline tables and conditional chart logic can help you achieve a custom user driven chart.

Connecting to Web Services With Qlikview

Over the past while I have been on a bit of a Web Services kick with Qlikview. Unfortunately for me the software’s standard GET connection didn’t really allow me to return much data directly into Qlikview. I was running across a couple of different issues…either the Web Service returned JSON or it required a POST command. As Qlikview does not support these types of services, I had to do some home brewing to get them to work in Qlikview. After some thought and some time, I have created a Java framework that can be customized by anyone who needs it.

Are There Blind Spots in Your Decision-Making?

Being a leader means spending a lot of time making decisions.

You know how important it is to have the data you need for decision-making. However, data alone often isn't enough for a decision to be made.

Decision-making is a complicated process. Everyone has a different method for making decisions they are confident with. Throw several people together who need to agree on one decision and the process becomes even more complicated.

Broken Glasses

Take the Test: How Observant Are You?

Success in business depends on good observation skills and being aware of what’s going on around you. Changes in the economy, your industry, with you competitors or within your own company can happen quickly and you need to be agile and able to respond quickly.

Fancy you have good observation skills? Take the test below and find out how you measure up.

How’d you do? Did you pass? If you're like most of us, probably not.

Looking To Squeeze More Value From Your Data?

Today, having actionable information is the key to competitive advantage. Industries have been improving everything they can on the machine side. They have invested and leveraged their people. These were the roads to competitive advantage, but with everyone doing this, new avenues must be found.

Boy squeezing ketchup onto fries

How Well Do You Know Your Business?

After the last time we chatted, I got a bit of a hard time from my co-workers regarding my announcement that pin cushions and needles excite me. OK, so when I say it like that, the harmless jibes may have been well deserved. Of course, if you read my last article, you’ll know I wasn’t talking about real pin cushions. I was talking about the nasty bits of bad data one can find when you start looking around. You can catch a glimpse of the previous article here.

5 Barriers That Are Holding Your Business Intelligence Back

Are you getting the most out of your investment in business intelligence? A common misconception in the corporate world is that to increase the value of your business intelligence efforts, you just need to throw more data at it.

Purchasing data, tying it to big data, doing more analysis – these are all strategies that are often deployed. However, if you are not maximizing what you have and don’t have a solid system in place, you may actually degrade the value through confusion and inconclusive or conflicting findings.

5 Tips To Help You Achieve a Consistent BI Application Design

When building QlikView applications a great deal of time is often spent on data, data quality and data validation. An equal or greater amount of time should also be spent on the design and presentation of your application. After all, what good is all that data if the users don’t know how to interpret it or have problems navigating through it? Data and design must work together to form a user friendly, easy to use, accurate and consistent set of documents, sheets and objects.

Why Bad Data is Sometimes a Good Thing

How often do you find yourself looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack when trying to solve a problem? What if when looking for that needle, you find that there’s a veritable pin cushion of needles buried deep within that haystack that you’re at risk of pricking yourself on? Does this notion excite you? If not, then should it?

Haystacks