There has never been a more exciting time for business leaders to leverage the power of data. With an ever-growing volume of data, businesses are turning to data-driven storytelling to make decisions, engage audiences and achieve transformative results.

This blog walks through the significance of data-driven storytelling in business operations. It presents Qlik Sense, Qlik’s modern analytics platform, and its role in enhancing data interpretation. Finally, it highlights the advanced features of Qlik Sense that support visualisation and reporting endeavours.

The Significance of Data-driven Storytelling in Business Operations

Today, enterprises can’t rely solely on raw data. While data is vital for decision-making, it can be overwhelming, intricate, and challenging for employees without analytical knowledge. To simplify this and create a data-literate workforce, businesses across sectors are adopting modern analytics solutions that facilitate data-driven storytelling capabilities. By combining the power of AI and the creativity of human intuition, these analytics assist in crafting compelling, insightful, actionable narratives that help enterprises and their stakeholders drive business transformation.

To understand the significance of data-driven storytelling, let’s break down its application in business operations.

Storytelling has a multifaceted role in business operations. From communicating complex information and creating contextual understanding to persuasive engagement, storytelling can augment operations and forge strategic actions towards business objectives.
By leveraging data for storytelling, enterprises can craft clear and convincing narratives that support targeted outcomes.
According to NIH studies, 65% of the population are visual learners. Thus, data-driven storytelling has a far-reaching impact than mere data presentation through spreadsheets.

Holistically, data-driven storytelling is a structured approach to communicating data through resonating visualisations such as graphs, infographics, and maps to explain, educate, and engage the audience for an intended outcome.

Leveraging Qlik Sense’s Modern Analytics for Business Storytelling

Recognising the importance of visual storytelling in enterprise operations, Qlik presents its intuitive and modern approach to business intelligence through its analytics platform; Qlik Sense. Qlik Sense supports comprehensive data visualisation, intelligent insight generation, active analytics, interactive dashboards and collaboration capabilities to empower enterprises to leverage context-aware insights and make strategic decisions.

Here’s how Qlik Sense enhances business storytelling:

1. Self-service Analytics

Self-service analytics is a breakthrough in the world of data analytics. Empowering users with analytical services enables non-technical staff to analyse and visualise data independently. Qlik Sense, in its pursuit to democratise modern analytics services, provides out-of-the-box self-service analytics features. It can equip all users with tools to access, visualise, and explore data, and it offers dashboard development and report generation features, making it feasible for all staff to have complete control over insight generation.

2. Associative Engine

To support holistic data visualisation, any analytics solution should have a robust analytics engine that supports swift and scalable exploratory data analysis. With pre-built unique associative technology, Qlik Sense seamlessly combines various data sources and allows for exploration without boundaries. Thus, this engine provides a peripheral vision of whole organisation’s data and automatically connects data points to uncover hidden relationships and insights. Using the associative engine, enterprises gain interactive data exploration capability and are equipped with context-aware insights.

3. Augmented Intelligence

Qlik Sense is integrated with AI-powered capabilities to assist users with insight generation, data analysis, and data visualisation. With AI-driven features, analytics solutions have an array of applications in business storytelling. It includes:

Automated Insight Generation: AI-embedded Qlik Sense can automatically sort vast amounts of data to uncover insights and trends. It also assists us in classifying the most important insights, which aids in the storytelling process.
Contextual Recommendation: Assisting in narrative building, AI-powered analytics solutions like Qlik Sense can suggest relevant data points to shape a compelling narrative. This data enrichment adds additional depth and dimension to business storytelling.
Augmented Visualisation: Data visualisation is an important tool for helping users understand the underlying concepts through interactive presentations. To support this, AI-driven capabilities can assist in effective visualisation endeavours, ensuring that storytelling is visually rich and engaging. Moreover, AI-powered tools can help create intuitive dashboards that are useful in decision-making efforts.

4. Dynamic Reporting

Beyond all these visualisations, effectively presenting the end results to stakeholders is far more significant than just using visual elements. To achieve this, Qlik supports its analytical solutions with dynamic reporting abilities. With Qlik Sense, users can build, publish and share compelling reports in a variety of formats. Furthermore, with its automated capability, Qlik Sense allows users to schedule, distribute and customise reports for all enterprise needs.

Use Case

For instance, let’s consider a retail company’s marketing team, which wants to review its latest campaign and plan future strategies. By leveraging Qlik Sense, the team can achieve the following:

1. Self-service Analytics

The marketing team members can individually explore the campaign data without IT intervention.
Each member of the team can build dashboards based on metrics and KPIs that are relevant to their role.
Swift access to data will help with strategic decision-making.

2. Associative Engine

The Qlik Sense’s engine can unify data from various sources, such as sales databases, web analytics, and social media metrics, into a single, unified view.
By reviewing the association with data points such as product sales performance and the marketing effort behind it, the team can tweak their strategies for a better outcome.

3. Augmented Intelligence

Through AI-powered intelligence, the team can effectively identify which demographic responded best to the campaign and plan accordingly.
Through contextual recommendation, the team can tailor their campaign efforts to boost the intended outcome.

4. Dynamic Reporting

The team members can interact with visually compelling reports, adjusting filters to explore different aspects of the performance data.
Through compelling visualisation, the team can access the necessary marketing data and present it in an engaging manner to make sense of the information.

Key Visualisation and Dashboard Features of Qlik Sense

Now that the role of Qlik Sense is addressed in modern business storytelling, let’s quickly delve into its key visualisation and dashboard features.

Intuitive Dashboard Builder: Qlik’s data visualisation solutions are now recognised as best-in-class visualisation and dashboard design tools by industry experts. By turning mere data into an engaging, dynamic experience, Qlik Sense empowers users to make an impact using their data. It offers a dashboard design feature where users can effortlessly build interactive, captivating dashboards within minutes. By seamlessly integrating external data into the Qlik loader, users can create dashboards and deploy various data visualisation methods to present the information effectively.

Associative Data Model: The primary reason behind data visualisation is to clearly understand the information needed to make strategic decisions. To fulfil this, Qlik Sense allows free data exploration to build riveting data-driven narratives. By unearthing hidden patterns and insights, the associative data model helps businesses make informed decisions, create compelling data stories, and enhance planning. This allows users to take swift action through their data, ultimately driving impactful business outcomes.

Rich Visualisations: With features such as drag-and-drop functionality and customisable visual elements, Qlik Sense enables users to intuitively visualise complex data sets. Compatible with a wide range of visualisation capabilities, such as Charts, Graphs, Heatmaps, Gantt charts, Network Graphs, Scatter Plots, Venn Diagrams, and more, Qlik Sense is an all-encompassing smart analytics solution for data-driven storytelling needs. Apart from the visual representation, Qlik Sense’s rich visualisation features empower businesses to present reports in an engaging manner that improves understanding and drives actionable insights.

Smart Search: To build engaging narratives and contextually relevant stories, it is necessary to sift through data to find the most pertinent and effective insights. Qlik Sense’s advanced search feature: Smart search, assists users in this pursuit. With the powerful capabilities of data exploration, navigation, and data filtering, smart search can be useful in the following ways:

Targeted research
Validating factual accuracy
Uncovering hidden themes and plots for storytelling
Unveiling authentic details for immersive settings

Ready to leverage Qlik Sense for data visualisation? Contact SquareOne experts to explore possibilities.

Advanced Visualisation with Qlik Sense

In addition to the powerful features covered, Qlik Sense encompasses other rich data visualisation tools. Here’s a brief rundown:

Geo Analytics: Geo Analytics is one of the dynamic features that businesses utilise in their data-driven storytelling process. To break it down, Geo Analytics is simply a feature that integrates geographical information with business data. Geo analytics helps storytelling through:

Geospatial visualisation
Spatial calculations
Interactive maps

For example, in the logistics sector, Geo analytics can be used to visualise delivery routes and manage fleet operations, optimising processes and enhancing strategic planning.

Embedded Active Analytics: The integration of true real-time data into insight generation can be highly beneficial for presenting data-driven stories. With the use of embedded active analytics, Qlik Sense provides the opportunity to interact and leverage live data, such as ongoing market trends and customer behaviours. Thus, users can use live data promptly to tell stories and make an impact by being the first to initiate analysis through data visualisation.

Collaborative Platform: Collaboration between teams and their members can significantly enhance the efforts of impactful storytelling. Qlik Sense, on top of all these advanced data visualisation features, provides a centralised platform that fosters collaboration. By facilitating a unified storytelling voice, Qlik Sense is ideal for streamlined teamwork in business storytelling.

Achieve Next-gen Data Visualisation with SquareOne Technologies

SquareOne Technologies’ expertise in the Qlik platform and data visualisation services accelerates enterprises’ ability to leverage their data, enabling them to embrace optimal analytics and data visualisation solutions. Assisting companies in their digital visualisation journey, SquareOne aids in leveraging advanced data visualisation tools for decision-making and strategic planning. With extensive experience in data management, data analytics and data visualisation, SquareOne is the ideal partner for your business storytelling needs.

The Final Word

Data-driven visualisation is a transformative approach to business storytelling. With strategic visualisation of data, enterprises can empower employees to simplify data analysis, generate relevant, powerful insights and present them to necessary audiences. With business intelligence and data analytics tools like Qlik Sense, businesses can enhance their data visualisation capabilities, driving significant impact across operations.

If you are curious to learn more about data visualisation, book a call with SquareOne Technologies and explore how Qlik solutions can address your needs.