Across government, departments are building data capability by recruiting analysts and data scientists to support decision making, operational delivery and help deliver Government transformation. The Government Data Science Partnership has supported this activity by developing training, capability programmes and an active data science community of interest.As well as increasing the number of data specialists in government, it’s also important that other communities understand the opportunity that better use of data presents.Qlik is a big partner in many Uk government organisations and it's great to see they are taking the education on data analytics and sciences seriously with the civil service and wider groups.Full article available here; Data literacy - improving conversations about data - Data in government ...View More

Last week the Qlik Academic Program attended the induction of the undergraduate and graduate students to the Alpha Iota Delta national honors society for the Decision Sciences & Information Systems at Saint Joseph's University!The 2018 class included 64 inductions from students across the United States. To learn more about the honors society at SJU visit Alpha Iota Delta | Department of Decision & System Sciences | Saint Joseph's UniversityThe Academic Program is thrilled to announce that it will fund the undergraduates one-time membership fee into the honors society and host a scholarship contest for those in the society who are in excellent academic standing and who join the Academic Program and successfully pass the Business Analyst Exam. The contest will run until the beginning of May and the winning students will receive a scholarship towards their 2018/2019 school year. Stay tuned as we will announce a winner or winners in the following months!Included in the inducted student group was Paul Franzonia who is an SJU alumni and a Qlik employee! Paul was granted a membership as a result of his passion for continuing to support the university and encourage the students to pursue careers in Analytics just as he did! ...View More

The Qlik Academic Program is excited to announce it has officially joined the Ottawa University Center for Business Analytics and Performance provided by Telfers School of Management.Analytic Software – Centre for Business Analytics and PerformanceOttawa University joined the program in 2017 through Professor Steve Smith who uses Qlik in his Data Supply Chain class. If you would like feature Qlik on your university's website email academicprogram@qlik.com ...View More

The Qlik Academic Program attended as mentors in the American Statistical Association (ASA) DataFest hosted at Stonehill College this month where students participated in a hackathon using a variety of tools including Qlik Sense!. Students participated from Bryant University, Bridgewater State, Stonehill College and UMass-Dartmouth.What is the ASA DataFest?The American Statistical Association (ASA) DataFest is a celebration of data in which teams of undergraduates work around the clock to find and share meaning in a large, rich, and complex data set. To learn more about the ASA DataFest visit https://ww2.amstat.org/education/datafest/Qlik on Twitter: "Qlik's own Caroline Sheldon and @qt_trigjoh took to #ASADATAFEST this year to help some next gen #data…If you would like Qlik to visit your universities events email academicprogram@qlik.com ...View More

According to a 2017 survey by the Graduate Management Admission Counsel, 69% of employers are seeking business graduates to fill data analytics roles within their companies. That's up from 51% in 2015. As a result, students now see the importance of being prepared to fill these roles and universities are jumping on the bandwagon to keep up. According to GMAC'S 2017 Prospective Student Survey, just under half of business school candidates say data analytics is a must-have in an ideal graduate business program.The Academic Program has long seen the importance of educating our students in analytics and ensuring that our professors have the resources they need to properly teach these students! To receive everything the program has to offer, visit https://www.qlik.com/us/company/academic-program to reapply!To learn more about the demand for data analytics and learn how universities are taking the call to action visit the full article written by Sarah Aspolson here https://view.imirus.com/209/document/12853/page/82 ...View More

I was honoured to be joined by David Bolton, VP Industry Solutions & Business Value for Qlik, he was recently promoted to this new position from his role focusing on Healthcare value, however was still as sharp as ever to speak around the key areas that Qlik helps improve efficiencies within healthcare organisations.This is the second year that David has provided the lecture for LSE and each time it is greeted with great interest from the students. Areas that David spoke around was the value of the Qlik engine to disparate data sources, examples of efficiencies in the NHS waiting times, A great example of how the Australia Government are using data to better treat patients and even discover possible issues with patients early using our software to pull multiple sources of information together on patient history.Finally, David finished the session discussing open data and how he has used it do develop applications around prescription trends in UK NHS trusts, which was very relevant to some students as some will be embarking on their thesis topics.I once again thank David and Professor Ela Klecun for the session and I look forward to the workshop in on June 21st. ...View More

The Academic Program was back onsite at Villanova University in PA (USA) this week to host a training workshop where members of the faculty from Finance, Business, and Marketing were in attendance. Qlik's very own Paul van Siclen and Jeremy Benza did a wonderful job showing Qlik's features and functionalities while guiding the professors on how to get started and begin creating their own visualizations. These professors are in the beginning stages of incorporating analytics and visualizations into their courses and there is no better place to begin than with joining the Qlik Sense Acacemic Program where they will receive free software, training, qualification exams and teaching materials to help them teach the methodologies of analytics and visualizations!If you are teaching a new course and would like to incorporate these concepts, we recommend reapplying to the program to get access to all of our amazing resources!If you are interested in a Qlik presentation or workshop please email academicprogram@qlik.com ...View More

Everyone knows Netflix, it is usually the first choice for a Saturday night in or a mid-week film to break up the week. The platform currently offers somewhere around 5,000 movies (https://www.allflicks.net/uk/) for UK viewers, spanning a host of genres depending on your mood and taste.However, in an increasingly competitive market Netflix is finding it is losing ground to its rivals!The Market PlaceFor instance, Amazon Prime pumped in the region of $5 billion into content bids and original content production in 2017 and alongside the Prime subscription model, viewers also can make the most of online renting or buying of content on Amazon, mainly when certain titles aren't available on their Prime service, a feature which Netflix doesn't have the luxury of offering (http://fortune.com/2017/03/10/netflix-video-streaming-market/). Even the likes of Facebook and YouTube are investing considerable sums of money into their video content to get a slice of the action.All of this got me thinking, how could Qlik be used to demonstrate a real-world business issue like Netflix, in one of my University engagements? Maybe a hackathon?The question I got asked most - What is a hackathon?From Google's dictionary, it describes a hackathon as "An event, typically lasting several days, in which many people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming."This isn't a new concept, hackathons occur every day but are largely for the programmers and computer scientists among us and they aim to answer a real-world problem, whether with data or development of an application.Accenture and the University of BathI took this idea to Dr Güneş Erdoğan, Director of Studies MSc in Business Analytics at the University of Bath, who Qlik's Academic Program has a long-standing relationship of working alongside in teaching students about data analytics. Güneş jumped at the opportunity to offer this kind of session to his students and right away got to work on the specifics of the session.Further to the engaging with Bath, I reached out to Accenture, who has supported hackathons alongside Qlik in the past. Accenture hire a significant number of students from Bath, with engagement through career services, societies and events. Accenture hire students with all different strengths, one area they may look for is students who have a mindset geared towards data and business. A hackathon is a great way for them to increase their presence amongst the student base and maybe find those students who might not have considered careers in analytics.Hackathon or Data Challenge? That is the question.The students in Business Analytics' classes aren't computer scientists, these are our future analysts, consultants and business leaders with knowledge in various areas of data analytics, statistics and commercial business and we opened the session up further by reaching out to courses in Information Systems and the MBA degrees. This expanded the knowledge and experience of the students in the session and matches closer to a real-world business team.However, calling this a hackathon might have scared some students away that weren't adept at computer science topics, so we decided to call this a Data Challenge and the students would be using Qlik Sense and other tools if they wished, to answer;A. "What Netflix's 2018 release library should look like?"andB. "What original content should they produce?"Quick stats!Some quick information about what we providedTwo sessions; an introduction to Qlik Sense in a 3-hour workshop to learn data loading, modelling and visualisation in Qlik Sense and a 6 hour data challenge where the students would build their applications around the Netflix brief.Student signed up the Qlik Academic Program and were set tasks to complete certain Qlik Continuous Classroom modules to assist in their application build.Student numbers; Around 40 students attended both sessions and were split in groups of 3/4.Administrators; Not including myself there were 3 Accenture analysts and 2 enterprise architects from Qlik supporting across the 2 sessions.Data; We provided the students data on movies, actors, box office stats, viewership of movies and more from the last 30 years. They were strongly advised to find further information online to add context to their applications.Presentation; Each student had 5 minutes to present their findings all of which must be backed up with data.Judging; The panel of judges made up from a mixture of attendees Accenture and Qlik. Criteria was based on; Quality of dashboard, data model, presentation structure, how closely the question was answered and reasoning of original Netflix content idea.ConclusionThe teams of student came up with a wide variety of ideas from looking at trends like super hero films to line up next to big releases next year. Others looked at box office revenue as an indication to popularity and advised on original content around those figures, some threw out our idea and decided to use a simplified algorithm that Netflix use to decide their listings, to varying degrees of success.The winners, the nicely titled 'Powerful 3 C's' choose to look at movie selections not in the top 3 choices, with actors who were well known but maybe under rated in their performances but would require a smaller salary in production. They also discovered that despite being the coldest month and everyone spending all their money through Christmas, January historically has very little new releases...who knew? So, based their findings on a January release. ...View More

The Qlik Academic Program is excited to announce that 2 of our Professors have been inducted into the Qlik Luminaries Class of 2018!What is the Qlik Luminary Program?The Qlik Luminary Program brings together the best and brightest customers, partners and enthusiasts in the Qlik ecosystem. With deep drive, passion and expertise, Qlik Luminaries champion the vision of turning data into insights that lead to transformative discoveries. To learn more visit https://www.qlik.com/us/solutions/customers/qlik-luminariesProfessor Ghosh joined the Academic Program in 2017 from Vidya Jyothi Institute of Technology where he and his students use Qlik Sense for Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, E-Governance, Web Technologies and Mobile computing. Professor Carter joined the Academic Program in 2013 from National University of Singapore where he and his students use Qlik Sense for his Purchasing and Materials Management course.Together these professors and many of their students have benefited from all the amazing resources the Academic Program has to offer which has led them to a very successful journey with Qlik!. We are excited and honored that they have been selected to represent Qlik as luminaries and we congratulate their work and dedication to both their teaching and to Qlik! ...View More

What is Data Literacy?Everyone is empowered and has the right to:Access education and tools that enable data literacy. This means having full confidence to read, work with, analyze and argue data.Access quality data - full source disclosure and accountabilityCombine, cross-pollinate and interrogate data, algorithms and findingsRecent Data Literacy StatsIn a study done in Asia Pacific, Qlik found that overall 80% found they were data illiterate! Also in the Americas, only 33% of decision business makers are data literate! As a result, work performance suffers and the success of the business is impacted. To watch the full interview with Julian Quinn, Qlik's Regional Vice President of Asia Pacific visitVideos on Demand - Channel NewsAsia - Channel NewsAsiaHow can you become Data Literate?Renew your membership to the Academic Program which provides free software, course materials, training, and Qualification exams to prove basic Qlik skills and applied knowledge. To renew visit https://www.qlik.com/us/company/academic-programLearn more about data literacy and test your data literacy knowledge by visiting http://dataliteracy.info/Visit the Qlik Continuous Classroom to view the data literacy program resources http://qcc.qlik.com/course/view.php?id=811 ...View More