Data discovery is the future of business intelligence. With data discovery, users pursue their own path to insight, make discoveries collaboratively, and can arrive at a whole new level of decision-making. Users are not limited to predefined paths or precalculated numbers. They do not need to formulate questions ahead of time. They can interact with data, find the questions, ask what they need to ask, and explore up, down, and sideways, rather than only drilling down in a predefined hierarchy.

Organizations might still need standardized reporting for many cases, but data discovery is the approach that ultimately fulfills the promise of business intelligence for everyone.

Data discovery is the inevitable consequence of demands from active users who want information from the ever-increasing amount of data. From the very beginning, the core of the Qlik philosophy was the empowered user. It affects both the view of how BI solutions should be developed and how the user interface of the tool should be designed.

In summary, data discovery is user-centric; it is BI for the empowered user. It means total freedom in how data is explored. It should be simple and have as few limitations as possible. Data discovery means a user-centric development process so that user feedback can be implemented instantaneously.