About

About the Qlik Board!

The Qlik Board is dedicated to all things QlikView. I was introduced to this fantastic software in 2008 and it has changed how I think about Business Intelligence … and more importantly how I build BI solutions. QlikView has a rich community of developers and the overall spirit is one of openness. I hope I can share a few tips & tricks in this blog. I’d like to hear from you if I make mistakes (100% guaranteed) or if this information is helpful to you.

– Bill Lay, The Qlik Board
[email protected]


More about The William Lay Group

Our mission is simple …

To help our clients achieve better business performance using data and insights.

  • Data that have measurable quality, are trusted, are valued, are shared.
  • Insights that come from the right people, the right analyses, the right technologies.

Bill Lay founded The William Lay Group in 2010, after spending over twelve years in corporate IT and five years in research science.

Prior to starting The William Lay Group, Bill was the global Business Intelligence Director at Technicolor. Under Bill’s leadership, the BI organization deployed solutions for supply chain operations, account management, sales, finance, manufacturing and quality.

Bill was originally brought in to turn the Entertainment division’s BI program around. As part of this overhaul, he modernized and cost-optimized the platform, and deployed a broad-scale, global BI extranet for clients. Later he brought QlikView into Technicolor as a rapid-value alternative to the “traditional” stack.

Before Technicolor, Bill was Director of IT at PCS Telecom, a private telco. It was here that his interest in data warehousing, BI and data mining exploded. He implemented their first data warehouse using MySQL. And leveraging very talented Java developers on his team, they developed a 100% data-driven ETL application, based on the CWM meta-model. Applications were built for operations, revenue assurance, finance and customer service.

His greatest achievement at PCS was a predictive analytics application built to perform fraud detection. It sourced data from the data warehouse to train a multi-variate linear regression model. Using the optimal model, scores were calculated for new customers in real-time and written back to the transactional system. This system improved gross margin by over 2%.

Bill’s formal education is in science and he holds a Ph.D. in Physics from UCLA. His research focus was theoretical condensed matter physics (i.e. things bigger than an electron but smaller than a bread basket!). All of his research work had a heavy computational component, with algorithms implemented in C++. Key projects involved simulation of polymer growth (“random walk” problems), curve-fitting and diagonalization of large matrices.

He has been helplessly dependent on computer technology since he was fifteen years old, when he was pounding out BASIC on an Apple II+. He lives with his wife and son in Los Angeles, California.

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