Donald Farmer, sinds jaren de Mr BI van Microsoft, stapte onlangs over naar QlikTech, de leverancier van het BI-tool QlikView. Op zijn blog schrijft hij:

I want to thank all who shared good wishes for my move to QlikTech. I am thrilled to join such a dynamic company and user community. Naturally, many of you have asked me why I chose to work at QlikTech. I can tell you quite simply: their customers. QlikView customers lead the major trend in Business Intelligence: the move from enablement to empowerment.

When I first started in BI (or as we called it then, decision support) over 15 years ago, the first challenge was simply to enable informed decisions. Financial, sales and production systems hardly spoke to each other. I’m sure you know all this. Any decent BI software you buy today solves these problems: acquiring data, some slicing and dicing, presenting the results. You should settle for nothing less.

This enabling approach was not enough. It became clear that the dynamics of business users and IT teams differ too radically. Business users need, and demand, agility. IT can be bound by technical and procedural constraints. One approach to this dilemma is to empower business users to develop and share their own BI. This is where QlikView proves its potential.