Narrative Science Brings Natural Language to Qlik Visualization Software

2016 Data Analytics Forecast: Top 5 Trends to Watch

Even with the advent of visualization tools, it’s still sometimes hard to decipher exactly what’s going on within a report involving complex relationships between large sets of numbers. Narrative Science developed Quill natural language software that automatically generates a narrative to guide end users through that data. Today Narrative Science announced an alliance with Qlik Technologies in which its Quill software will be integrated with Qlik Sense visualization software.

Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel says the goal is to not only make it easier for end users to identify the relationships between different sets of data, but to also eliminate much of the drudgery associated with creating reports.

In general, organizations of all sizes are increasingly starting to take advantage of advanced applications to reduce layers of middle management. Not only are senior managers looking to flatten their organizations, most of them are looking to put as much of their human capital as possible in direct contact with customers. The basic theory is that the more people those organizations have interacting with customers, the more revenue the overall business generates.

How that theory pans out in actual practice remains to be seen. But Frankel says the one thing that an organization should be able to count on when employing Quill is that more reliable insights into large amounts of data should lead to more actionable business insights without requiring organizations to dedicate IT staff or business analysts just to generate a report.

Less obvious, however, is how senior managers will be groomed over time if the number of people needed to fulfil the middle management ranks in the years ahead is greatly reduced.