Building a Flexible, Thriving Analytics Ecosystem with Alteryx and Qlik

[andrewdatakim]

When most of us start a journey, we try to think of ways to make our experience easy, enjoyable, and shareable. We seek out opportunities that will allow us to experience new possibilities, test our boundaries, or at times, just relax. I try to apply these principles to all aspects of life, including my work.  This mindset always has me on the search for technology that provides me with flexibility to achieve new limits, relax by reducing the monotony, and take deep dives into new realms with data. At Adventist Health System, the Alteryx and Qlik analytics stack, with its depth and breadth, helps empower me and my colleagues with such flexibility.

Unifying the Analytics Experience

Our current Center of Excellence (CoE) process allows us to use Alteryx to conduct transparent in-stream validation for batch process work. We can pass the clean, validated data to Qlik to visualize using the EDX (Event-Based Data Exchange) trigger via a push-driven strategy, when the data is available.  By using a push strategy, we ensure completeness of the data presented in the applications. This process separation reduces the load on the Qlik Management Console and allows our Qlik developers to stay focused on visualizations and the user experience for the end business users.

We adopted this process when attempting to answer the following two questions:

1. How do we reduce the number of calculations that run every time a user makes a change to the app?
2. How do we increase the depth of analytical offering to Adventist Health System?

Reducing the calculations in the visualization tool is critical to the growth and success of any organization looking to use analytics as a catalyst. We must remember that user experience trumps all, and if users are experiencing lags in application load time, they will find another way to get their analytical insights faster. So, what if we could offset the calculations by pre-processing the data? By using Alteryx we are able to remove more than 60% of the calculations from Qlik and provide a seamless experience for the users from the get-go.

With the Alteryx analytics platform, we now have the flexibility to grow our applications in complexity and depth, and to encourage our users to find more valuable insights as they transition from gathering low-hanging fruit to more advanced analytics within Alteryx. The addition of Alteryx also provides us with automated validation opportunities through notifications for continuous process improvement.

Below is a diagram of our process after we implemented Alteryx:

Learn More on Our Upcoming Live Webinar

If you are interested in hearing more about the value of the Alteryx and Qlik analytics stack, as well its use within Adventist Health System, please be sure to register for our May 17^th webinar.  Register now and please be sure to bring any questions you may have!