Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Ever been frustrated by someone having all the answers then realising they don't know why those answers are right?

As we've taken Yellowfin 8 to market, we've been overwhelmed by the response we've had from media and analysts across the industry. We actually shocked the industry a bit because people didn’t expect an established dashboard vendor to be willing to disrupt themselves with two radical new products.

The best article I’ve read recently, Is the business intelligence dashboard dead? by Marius Moscovici. This article challenges the status quo around what a dashboard is, why it exists, and what business users want from their analytics.

We’re heading into the holiday season, which is a great opportunity to reflect on the year that's just gone. For me, this year has been dominated by the release of Yellowfin 8 and two new products in particular - Stories and Signals.

Ever since Business Intelligence emerged as a technical and commercial practice, the promise has been that the right information, delivered at the right time, in the right format would help us, as users, to make better decisions.

Earlier this year, I attended the Pacific Northwest BI & Analytics Summit. It’s a relatively small industry event that brings together some thought leaders, industry analysts and representatives from major vendors who are all intensely passionate about the BI space. Some of the people who were there include Donald Farmer, Doc Searls, Jill Dyche, Claudia Imhoff, Mike Ferguson and Shaun Rodgers.

When I attended the Pacific Northwest BI & Analytics Summit this summer, we had a great discussion about data interpretation and the way organizations consume data. One of the things that came up was how the industry has been so focused on using dashboards as the delivery mechanism for analytics that we’ve lost the art of long-form analysis.

I’ve read and heard a lot about how organizations need ‘data interpreters’ lately. For me, this raises the question of what do analytics departments do today?

The Yellowfin team spent their Wednesday at the She Loves Data event in Melbourne. It was brilliant. If you’re not familiar, She Loves Data (previously called Data Girls) is a data analytics initiative, that focuses on teaching and encouraging women to learn about data, technology, and analytics. They hold regular workshops for women in 6 different APAC cities to build a community for them to come together to learn, connect with each other, and have fun.

We’re in the early stages of a dramatic transition for the analytics industry. More and more of the jobs that were previously done by analysts are being automated. Technology is changing the way organizations receive information. People are being alerted to both good and bad news as it happens and this has profound behavioral consequences for organizations.