Hello, I’m Richard Pearce—a Business Intelligence and Qlik specialist with more than 20 years of experience helping organisations turn data into something genuinely useful.

I’ve worked across banking, manufacturing, healthcare and other sectors, delivering everything from data platforms and Qlik environments to dashboards, development standards and release processes. I was also recognised as a Qlik Luminary for four consecutive years and invited to speak about Qlik best practices at Qlik World.

Today, alongside my consulting work, I’m the founder of DevFulfilled—a platform built to bring better change management, version control, testing and governance to Qlik Sense development.

QlikCentral is where I share practical technical examples, ideas and lessons gathered along the way. Some articles solve a specific development problem; others explore the wider challenges of managing analytics at scale.

If you wish to ask me anything or connect you can reach out to me here, on the Qlik Community, or linkedin.

It started with an Amiga and the National Lottery

My first encounter with dashboards was in 1994—although I didn’t know to call them dashboards at the time.

The National Lottery had just started and the nation was gripped with lotto fever. Back then I was 16 years old and, as a hobby, developing games and tools on the Commodore Amiga (using Amos the Creator). I had a crack at developing a ‘number picker’. Not a simple random number generator but a scientific program that stored a history of the numbers drawn so far to predict the next likely outcome.

Needless to say, I never got all six numbers although I did better than most – for those interested the chance of getting three numbers (£10 win) is approx. 1 in 50 using a random number generator. My software could pick three correct numbers once in every 20 attempts…. so still losing money.

An offshoot of the project was developing statistics on the lottery itself and the performance of my software. My first dashboard was created. Unfortunately, I don’t have the program anymore (or an Amiga). However, someone out there may still have a working copy as it was distributed through Amiga Format magazine (The National Lottery – Liberty Software).

 

Skip forward a few years and I was working with a large media company. They had a challenge connecting two systems together to generate reports. They were using excel workbooks with pivot tables. Seeing the issue I bought a number of books and learned Visual Basic. Due to my history of software coding whilst I was younger I was already halfway there and within a short amount of time I’d written the code required and the systems were linked (and I was hooked)

Over the next 15 years, I worked for a number of prominent organizations (banking, manufacturing, and health care). I moved away from development and into leadership roles and project management.

I then found myself as a stakeholder in a Data Warehouse project. The initial scope was to build a SQL database to aid the reporting function. As a stakeholder, I asked for the scope to include a dashboarding tool like Business Objects (as I’d had some experience using this software). subsequently, the scope was changed to include the procurement of a new system…..

Soon afterward I moved roles and now on the project team became responsible for the delivery of the database including the new tool I requested.

I began speaking with the main vendors of dashboarding tools and organized meetings with them to review and compare their products. Skip forward again and I’d purchased QlikView for the organization.

The challenge now was we had a great tool although no in-house experience on how to use it. Not for the first time I got the books together and began to learn.

In my previous role leading their Analyst Team, I’d already worked with the end users and gathered their requirements and I was fortunate to have a green field with QlikView. Server sizing, installation, development and production were built up from scratch.

Now my focus is on Qlik development (QlikView and Qlik Sense) as a consultant and I’m enjoying working with new organizations and helping them get the most out of the Qlik analytics platform.

In 2016 I joined the QlikDevGroup leadership team in London. In this role, I organise regular events where developers can come for free in the evening, Eat Pizza, Drink Beer and hear all about Qlik’s latest developments and ideas from a whole host of speakers from around the world (http://qlikdevgroup.com/london-home/)

In 2017 I joined the Qlik Luminary program and was successful again in 2018, 2019, and 2020.

After many years working with Qlik teams, I kept encountering the same challenge: building the application was only part of the job. Teams still needed to understand what had changed, carry out reviews, manage testing, obtain approvals and maintain a reliable history of each release.

That experience led me to create DevFulfilled—a release management and governance platform designed specifically for Qlik Sense.

It also gives me plenty of new technical subjects to explore here on QlikCentral.

Richard