Data Principles is a proud partner of Qlik, a leading analytics, data integration, and AI company. Qlik Sense Cloud is designed for self-service analytics; it allows users of any skill level to easily interact with their organization’s data with speed of thought analytics. 

Organizations often make significant investments in business intelligence (BI) tools like Qlik Sense, Tableau, Power BI, etc. There’s a good reason for this: with the correct setup and with integrated, high-quality, and easy-to-use data, organizations can see a massive ROI. But here’s the thing: even the best BI platform, with the most sophisticated setup, won’t deliver its full value to your organization unless the business users have the confidence to use it. 

Data Principles recently conducted a training session for Qlik Sense Analyzer users for a client. Analyzer users aren’t developers; they don’t build dashboards or create visualizations. But they interact with pre-built visualizations to extract insights and support daily decision-making within their departments. These are the non-technical people within an organization: sales, marketing, human resources, etc. Our training session focused on helping them log in, navigate through the Qlik apps, apply filters to visualizations, explore selections, and export visualizations. The goal of the training is to give the business users the confidence to use Qlik to its full potential. 

The feedback was clear. Business users felt empowered to really use Qlik to fuel their decision-making. And just like that, business users and organization leaders are now using Qlik’s self-service analytics capabilities to make data-driven decisions. 

However, training cannot end with just one session with the business users. Qlik is a complex tool with many unique functionalities and new features are being added every month to improve the tool. It is critical that business users have an open line of communication with the BI team and even a monthly user group meeting, where they can ask questions and learn about the new updates to Qlik. This will further empower business users to use Qlik to its full potential. 

It is far too common for organizations to forget about these steps. They will make a significant investment in a BI tool and even ensure that it has the proper setup but then leave the business users to figure out the tool on their own. The result? An expensive and underutilized investment, and countless missed business opportunities. 

That’s why investing in a powerful BI tool like Qlik and a detailed training plan for business users is essential. The business expertise of an organization’s sales or marketing team, combined with a powerful BI tool and training to empower self-service analytics, will lead to better data-driven decision-making for your organization.