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Qlik Luminary Life – Joe Warbington of Vizlib

Here at Motio we’ve started a new blog and video interview series entitled Qlik Luminary Life. The purpose of this series is to highlight and showcase Qlik Luminaries, find out why they love Qlik and get to know them on a more personal level.

For our first interview, we had the opportunity to speak with Joe Warbington, Senior Director of Industry Solutions at Vizlib and learn more about the challenges Qlik has helped him overcome, his hobbies, and his extensive knowledge of Wu-Tang Clan songs that he memorized for a Qlik app.

Why did you decide to apply to be a Qlik Luminary? 

For years, while I was at Qlik on the healthcare team, I admired and made a number of great connections with the Qlik Luminaries. It was my mission to someday join the party.

Favorite thing about Qlik? 

You might expect me to say the visuals or the APIs, but hands down my favorite thing about the Qlik technology is the power of the grey. It is mindblowing for people once they can understand that in most businesses and for many uses, it’s the data that’s missing that might be more important than the data that’s present and visualized. In healthcare, it was so powerful to help organizations see which medications weren’t prescribed, which diseases and conditions weren’t co-indicated, and most importantly what patients hadn’t been seen yet. That’s how things improve: the missing data – the stuff in the grey – are the opportunities.

Tell me about the biggest challenge Qlik helped you to overcome. 

That’s tough, as I’ve seen a lot of great Qlik apps and solutions over the years, many of which in healthcare had a direct impact on the lives of patients. Maybe one of my favorites and one that I keep coming back to improve and refresh is an app around my health data. For years, I’ve been tracking my fitness passively through my iPhone. When I later got an Apple Watch, I started tracking my heart rate and workouts as well. It’s mounds of data, on just me. Exporting the file from Apple Health via the APIs results in gigabytes of XML data that I massage and bring into a comprehensive Qlik app. I can easily see how my health metrics are affected by my lifestyle choices, workouts, travel, weather, etc. I’ve even used to show my doctor about my health because it was way more data on me than my healthcare providers have. I wrote about it here https://blog.qlik.com/the-electronic-sickness-record and here https://branch-blog.qlik.com/apple-healthkit-a-delicious-qlik-recipe-d61167e7ab89. A shining moment with that app? I got to demo it to executives from Apple during a large healthcare IT conference last year – they loved the functionality and of course the visual branding.

Advice for those wanting to become a future Luminary? 

Get social! The existing community is active in a number of channels and loves to be helpful and will share your work. If your use of Qlik is mainly related to your job and you can’t share that, start building apps using public data. Kaggle is a great resource for a variety of data sets.

Tell us a little bit about what Vizlib does. 

Vizlib is Qlik’s leading technology partner for value-added products. We help make Qlik Sense shine with new visualizations, increased capabilities, and amazing customization options that help make your data talk. If you can think it, you can build it with Vizlib + Qlik Sense.

When you’re not working and being a Luminary what hobbies or activities do you enjoy?

Like many folks, it’s tough to stop thinking about data and visualizations. But in my spare time, I love playing with and making my son laugh, and training capoeira – a Brazilian martial art.

Name a song you have completely memorized.

Besides Elmo’s World theme song (see above about my young son)? I studied a lot of Wu-Tang Clan songs for a rap lyrics project. Yep – a Qlik app. It analyzed the largest vocabularies of famous rappers.

What would be your first question after waking up from being cryogenically frozen for 100 years? 

Where’s the closest coffee shop?

Interested in learning more about Joe Warbington? Be sure to follow him on his social media handles listed below and be sure to stay tuned for episode two where we get to know Nitesh Sethi, CEO of Cliqvenus.

If you’re a Qlik Luminary and are interested in being featured for our blog series contact Michael Daughters at mdaughters@motio.com.

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