Joe DosSantos: How Qlik is Making Business Analytics More Efficient in the Cloud

Joe DosSantos, Chief Data Officer at business analytics platform
Qlik, outlines why he believes the company’s ‘cloud-based offering
is the future of business analyticsThe advent of cloud-based
software as a service (SaaS) lowered the barrier to entry for all
manner of business analytics capabilities. The cloud makes it much
easier for companies to experiment with and acquire data-driven
toolsby removing the need to build and maintain software products
in-house.But as Joe DosSantos, Chief Data Officer at business
analytics platform Qlik, notes in this week’s Business of Data
podcast, it’s only recently that many data-focused executives have
started to get comfortable with cloud-based technologies.“People
were a little bit nervous about the cloud,” he says. “Generally
speaking, people have been born and raised in the data area to be
very afraid of moving data anywhere where they can’t control it.”In
recent years, attitudes toward cloud-based platforms and services
has changed dramatically. For DosSantos, this is partly down to how
greatly these technologies have matured.“The tools are out there,
now,” he says. “People have known and loved Qlik for a long time.
But what’s new and different is, ‘How do I start to get comfortable
with the idea of my data being somewhere ‘out there’?’”Qlik’s
‘Italian Cooking’ Approach to Business AnalyticsDosSantos says a
key benefit of doing analytics in the cloud is that it makes it
easier for company stakeholders to access the data they need and
connect datasets to uncover valuable business insights. “It’s all
about ‘time to value’, at the end of the day,” he says. “How do I
take this data and make sense of it more quickly? So, SaaS is
fundamentally a way to get there faster.” To illustrate his views
about how best to approach this, DosSantos uses the analogy of
French versus Italian cooking. French recipes are sophisticated and
require detailed knowledge of the chef and their ingredients. But
Italian food is about simplicity and the quality of the
ingredients.“In the data lake era, we kind of let everyone fend for
themselves,” he says. “We said, ‘Go and grab raw data and figure it
out.’ It was French cooking.”He adds: “What we’re trying to do is
roll out this idea that what you want to do is put the best data
that’s already been finely curated out there, so people can get the
answers quickly.”By focusing on taking high-quality data and making
it available to people at the right time to inform key decisions,
DosSantos believes companies can maximize the value they drive with
business analytics in the cloud.“Decisions must be part of one’s
calculus,” he concludes. “At Qlik we call that active intelligence.
It’s not good enough to know something. One must do something with
that which you know.”Key TakeawaysThe future of analytics is in
the cloud. SaaS is helping enterprises make data available to
company stakeholders, so they can use it to uncover valuable
business insightsProvide access to high-quality data. DosSantos
argues that data leaders should focus their efforts on making
high-quality data available to as many company stakeholders as
possibleActive business intelligence is the key. Enterprises must
integrate insights with business processes, so they inform the
decisions staff members make Other quotes“People have known and
loved Qlik for a long time. But what’s new and different is, how do
I start to get comfortable with the idea of my data being somewhere
‘out there’? And the tools are all there, now... and I think now
the expectation is there.”“Analytics is fundamentally about the
discovery of new things and the connecting of new data... so, one
of the things that we had to do was to make sure that the security
was super intuitive, clear, understandable, and that we offered
people a really complete way to understand what kind of data assets
were being made available.”>> says execs are starting to
expect teams to be able to adopt new technologies in the cloud“The
idea that we had as weJ