1. QlikView Center of Excellence
Hernán Azpiri

2. Table of contents Today’s reality
QlikView Center of Excellence (QVCoE)
Definition
Objectives
Organization
Skills
Tasks of the QVCoE
Benefits

3. Today’s reality
In assessing an organizations' readiness for using business intelligence (BI) pervasively across the entire company, and to drive business transformation, we plot organizations according to two dimensions:
the maturity of their technology infrastructure to support pervasive BI; and
2) the maturity in the use and analysis of information. The ideal maturity curve is plotted, approximating a linear relationship between the technology andinformation maturity axes. On the ideal maturity curve, the more investment you make in BI-related technology, the broader the use and analysis of information you have.
Most organizations aren't on the trajectory to achieve pervasive BI, or use BI in driving business transformation broadly. The typical organization falls into one of three places on the curve:
Information apathy:an organization has invested a large amount of money in BI infrastructure and products, but it still has meager use and adoption from the business community.
Analytic obsession: the technology infrastructure is incapable of supporting broad and pervasive use of BI. Therefore, islands of analysis have emerged, typically sitting on top of specialized infrastructures and managed by "shadow IT organizations."
Information anarchy:which is unfortunately far too common in most organizations. This is where spreadsheets are used as "BI duct tape"; the need for analysis is high and pervasive, but the infrastructure can't support it in any way.

4. Today’s reality
QlikView is used as a departmental solution, in isolation, generating information silos
IT only sees QlikView as a dashboard tool
Knowledge is not uniform across the organization
A corporate standard for data modelling and development does not exists, reducing the opportunities for re-use
There is no quality assurance for the developed applications
Infrastructure resources (hardware, software, processes, human) are not optimized
Gartner: Through 2011, most organizations will spend 70% of the time, energy, and money that they invest in BI resolving people, process and governance issues.

5. Barriers to self-service BI
Performance
In-memory
Appliances
Usability
Interactive visualization
Search
Accuracy
Application life-cycle management
Not needed
Demand for fast queries against big data sets, coupled with lower-priced 64-bit computing, will drive a trend toward in-memory technology. Loading detailed data into memory for reporting and analysis will reduce the need to build aggregate data structures —a key component of most BI deployments. IT organizations typically build a data layer optimized for query performance. This performance layer normally takes one of two forms: de-normalized star schemas or multidimensional OLAP cubes. The key ingredient in either approach is to build a specialized data structure that improves performance by aggregating information and performing calculations in advance. IT organizations have invested enormous amounts of time to build this performance layer. Although these efforts are usually successful at improving performance, they create other challenges: lack of self-service, IT maintenance and information latency. To avoid these problems, some organizations have embraced a different architecture to optimize BI application performance. Instead of building an aggregate layer, detailed data is loaded into memory, where calculations are performed quickly at query time.
The official Gartner definition states that "Data warehouse appliances are hardware and database management systems software integrated and packaged to provide support for business intelligence applications." Appliance vendors optimize their solutions for specific needs. As they expand their capability, they become more complex to implement, cease to be an appliance, and become a data warehouse platform. Right now, appliance vendors produce strategic or tactical appliances. A strategic solution enables full-table, full-database mining, scans and reads, and supports miners and some deep business analysts. As user counts increase on these solutions, the performance side of the SLA suffers not from speed of query processing, but the length of the wait queue. Tactical solutions are good at providing sub-domains of data, optimized to isolate some queries in their usage of CPU, disk and memory, and frequently experience issues when addressing full database and full table access. These solutions keep the queue short until a strategic query creates a backlog.
Consider interactive visualization as a means of making analysis easier and more effective. Tactical Guideline: Most BI teams will need to add a new role with visual design and layout expertise.
Traditional ad hoc query is not intuitive for most users; search is. All the entrenched BI platform vendors are bolstering their capabilities with strong search to enable their customers to find the right report more easily. However, some vendors, such as Fast Search and Transfer, Endeca, Business Objects and Information Builders, are promoting a more ambitious use of BI integrated search that doesn't only find existing reports, but also creates new reports based on key words in a search.
Setting up separate environments for development, testing and production is a step further toward establishing controlled governance across all BI projects. In addition to the code artifacts, important information includes who requested a change, who reviewed and approved the item, requirements and design discussions and decisions, and implementation and test plans and details.
Environment migration —The software change management process controls migration patterns (that is, how a given set of code moves from one environment to another). While large organizations may have automated solutions to control the migration process, others do it manually. In either case, it's critical that the transitions and approvals along the path be well-defined and that the data to support traceability and accountability be preserved.
Emergency changes —Programmer access to production for emergency or "hot" fixes is still found, but it is hazardous and difficult to manage. The access has to be temporary and revoked immediately on the completion of the fix. Alternatively, some organizations grant the temporary access to a separate fix-test environment or to the preproduction environment. Once the patch is ready, production control personnel can deploy it through standard mechanisms to production.
Complexity —The more environments you own, the more complex the process of making changes is, the more organizational challenges you have, and the more difficult it is to be flexible to changes in the project because shifting requirements or defects are discovered.

6. QlikView Center of Excellence
QlikView CoE
Integrated by a mixed team from IT and business users, the QVCoE centralizes organizational knowledge and best practices to standardize, implement, and manage business intelligence solutions in the organization.
Objectives
Develop and share QlikView best practices
Ensure functionality and operation of QlikView applications
Design and implement a common BI architecture
Promote the use of BI throughout the organization

7. Recruit an Executive sponsor
Provides guidance, direction, requirements, and management
Guide and promote the QVCoE to other excutives
Evolve over time
CIO
BICC
ERP …
CFO
BICC
Finance …
COO
Division 1
Division 2
BICC

8. QlikView Center of Excellence
Strategy
Align Business and BI
Portfolio management
PMO
Integration
Promotion and expansion
Knowledge mgnt
Best practices
Onsite knowledge transfer:
Professional
Developer
Advanced
End-users
Ad-hoc
Development
Projects
Project planning and management
New application development
Enhancements
Evolution Development
New functionality for existing apps
Redesign
Data Management
Entreprise Data Architecture
Conformed dimension
Metadata
Infrastructure
Administration
Hardware migration
Server/Publisher configuration
Performance tuning
Installation
Support
Onsite first level support
Helpdesk
Contact point with global support
Issue resolution
Vendor relations
License admin
Contract management

9. Organizational Structure
Centralized or decentralized
Depends on company culture and policies
Central architecture, best practices, data governance
Decentralized anlysis and BI development embebed with the business
Dedicated or virtual
Think big, start small
Allow for growth
New geographies
M&A

10. Center of Excellence – Centralized organization

11. Center of Excellence – Fully decentralized organization

12. Center of Excellence – Mixed organization

13. People skills Business IT Analytics
Understand strategy and business objectives, LOB and inter-LOB needs
360 Communication
Align business and BI
Business process improvement through BI IT
Solution architect
Data modelling, integration, and quality
Application administration and infrastructure
Analytics
Understand the data and its relationships
Multidimensional analysis and data discovery

14. Benefits Increase credibility and confidence in corporate information
Rollout the use of BI for the whole company
Accelerate decision making process
Optimize resources and reduce costs
Business process innovation through BI insights
Continuously evolve QlikView BI applications to support changing business requirements

15. Next steps Define: Executive Sponsor COE mandate and objectives
Funding
Organizational structure/reporting lines
Functional areas
Required roles
COE KPIs

16. Hernán Azpiri