BI - A Parallel World

Today I attended an event a the Times Square Sheration in New York, sponsored by Qlik, named 'Visualize Your World'. See: http://www.qlik.com/us/landing/vyw-2015/new-york. Qlik is a software company with a market cap over $2 billion that specializes in business intelligence. Wikipedia defines 'BI' as, "the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes." I met a representative of a vendor named Teradata which integrates its product with the QlikView software and specializes in a field know as data warehousing - essentially the data sets BI draws upon. BI is distinguished from Competitive Intelligence. Competitive Intelligence involves the analysis of market data to anlayze a business's competitors, which as BI focuses on internal data.

So the clients of law firms move through this data driven world guided by specialists in a field bigger and more innovative than electronic discovery. Litigation is an afterthough - a nuisance.

I got a demonstration of a program called Alteryx, which performs 'data discovery' with Qlik - a form of BI involving interactive reports. The Alteryx rep gave me a quick run through of how his product can pull data from different sources. It seems far smoother and faster than importing data into Access. I have it installed on my PC and plan to see how it compares with the grep utlitiy I've been using.