This article was written by Elif Tutuk and originally appeared on the Qlik Blog here: https://www.qlik.com/blog/2021-the-year-of-innovations-for-jobs-to-be-done
While COVID-19 continues to cause devastating disruption to the global economy more than two years into the pandemic, it is also continuing to force remarkable innovation across different industries. Companies have found new ways to sell, service and operate during the crisis. For me, there is one common theme for these innovative companies, including Qlik, and it is “Jobs to be Done.”
"Jobs to be Done" is a framework for innovation. It is a perspective through which a company can take its understanding of customer needs to the next level and bring predictability to innovation. The theory is based on the notion that people buy products and services to get a “job” done. For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress, considering the circumstances that they are in.
2021 is the year of innovations for “Jobs to be Done,” because, for many “Jobs,” we have offered new solutions. The jobs themselves were enduring and persistent, but the way we solved them has changed given the new circumstances: In person meetings have been replaced by Zoom meetings; going to the gym has been replaced by new in-home workout solutions; and many consumer-facing companies have repurposed physical locations, explored new business models, and rapidly adopted advanced analytics and other disruptive technologies to find new sources of growth.
At Qlik, 2021 is the year where we made our vision for Active Intelligence a reality. So, what jobs have we solved for our users given the new circumstances? In my last blog of the year, I would like to highlight my favorite innovations from a "Jobs to be Done" perspective.
Gaining Insights From Data With Agility and Security In Place
Speed and agility became a necessity when analyzing data, not only for enterprises to outperform competitors, but also simply to survive amid rapidly changing economic conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, having the right security measures in place was needed to ensure the safety of proprietary information and to provide regulatory compliance.
The job for gaining insights from data was even more necessary and on-premises analytics deployments were unable to match the needs of the new circumstances. And, that’s why we have innovated Qlik Forts.
With the Qlik Active Intelligence Platform, our users get the job done, gaining insights from their data with an open-SaaS platform with cloud-agnostic and hybrid deployment options.
We innovated Qlik Forts for our customers who cannot move their data to the cloud because of data locality requirements. These customers still would like to enable their distributed teams with a single point of entry to data and insights on the cloud with agility and speed. Now, they use Qlik Cloud, whether their data is in Qlik Forts, in Qlik Cloud or a mix of both.
Qlik Forts runs completely behind customers' tightly secured firewalls, eliminating the need for data to travel to Qlik Cloud or over the internet. This innovation gives our customers complete flexibility over how and where they deploy analytics services and get analytics done. It is a game changer for organizations who chose SaaS for modern analytics, and it is one of my favorite innovations of this year!
Make Data-driven Decisions While Collaborating Remotely
With hybrid work becoming the new normal, we innovated Collaborative Notes as a new way to help our users connect and engage for data-driven decisions, regardless of location and time zone. Most insight-driven actions require inputs from multiple stakeholders in order to achieve a consensus based on sufficient, reliable data. The "Jobs to be Done" here are to collaborate and discuss findings from data as a group remotely – and Collaborative Notes is a great solution to get the job done.
Compel Actions From Real-time Insights
This is my favorite “Jobs to be Done” category for any analytics solutions: Compel Actions. As I summarized some of my thoughts in this previous blog, dashboards are not built to deliver insights for the sake of delivering insights. Users consume dashboards for insights, gathering and using those insights for collaborative decision-making and to take data-driven actions.
The decision-making environment in most organizations today seldom lives up to all aspects of this model. The loop is fragmented between different tools, such as dashboards, spreadsheets, BI-discovery software, collaborative apps, and so on. Some areas are supported only poorly, if at all. For example, action taking may be instigated and tracked only through presentations and e-mails.
With the Qlik Active Intelligence Platform, we innovated a single end-to-end cloud solution, where the users are not only augmented with insights, but also enabled to automate actions and business processes based on these insights with Qlik Application Automation. Qlik Application Automation is the innovation highlight for me this year, achieving the ultimate "Jobs to be Done" for analytics – namely, to compel and orchestrate actions.
At Qlik, innovating is not a hit or miss effort. We carefully investigate the progress – the jobs – that our users would like to get done within the circumstances and innovate solutions accordingly.
2021 was a year where we have proven, again, that innovation is built into Qlik's vision, purpose and organizational mission – and that customers can predict that Qlik can reliably drive innovations that will help them with their work. I look forward to 2022, as we continue to increase our knowledge about our customers, knowledge which will fuel our passion for continually innovating to ensure we can help customers accomplish their "Jobs to be Done"!