Most CEOs would probably say they receive a low return on investment from their business intelligence and analytics. This is because they get the most value from data when the numbers are contextual – when they’re connected to what’s actually happening in their business.
More and more countries are imposing requirements on organisations to provide Standard Audit Files for Tax purposes (SAF-T), including the UK. HMRC requires businesses to keep their records digitally and provide their VAT returns through Making Tax Digital (MTD) functional compatible software as of April 2019. So this seems like an opportune moment to continue my series of blogs about Yellowfin partners by introducing the brilliant 4apps – a business helping tackle the VAT software problem.
The best piece I read this month was about how to build a recommendation engine in R by Data-Mania. It’s a little bit tangential to the BI space but it was interesting to me personally because I’m not a data scientist.
July was a huge month for merger and acquisition (M&A) activity in the BI space. Thoughtspot raised $145 million, Salesforce acquired Datorama, Workday acquired Stories.bi and Tableau acquired Empirical Systems.
We’re delighted that Yellowfin has been awarded a place on the public sector’s G-Cloud 10 (G10) framework, which enables us to supply British public sector organisations with the Yellowfin platform more easily.
Our financial year came to a close at the end June and Yellowfin had another solid year of growth. There was consistent growth across all regions – in Europe, Japan, APAC and the US.
When I speak to people who are thinking about implementing BI, they are often overwhelmed by all the things they could measure. Many start by wanting to measure everything, which doesn’t necessarily help them. That’s because there’s an inherent cost in measuring things – everything you report and track creates an ongoing burden that your organization has to maintain. That’s why it’s important to be selective about what you measure from the get-go.
Makeover Monday is a global initiative started by Tableau to encourage people to build visualizations. It involves releasing a new dataset each week and letting people reimagine the way it is visualized. It’s a really interesting experience and anyone can participate.
The third edition of Yellowfin Bytes brings you an exciting inclusion made to the Data Transformation module. Users have been exploring Yellowfin’s very own lite version of an ETL tool in the form of this module, ever since its introduction in Yellowfin 7.4 last year. We have since been enhancing this functionality by adding new steps, calculations, configurations, and more.
Out of the hundreds of BI analysts I’ve interacted with over the years, there are five that stand out as exceptional. To me, they stand out as the big-picture thinkers who have a clear passion for the BI space. Rather than just thinking mechanically about vendors, they’re focused on the broader role and evolution of data analytics and BI as a whole. This is my list of the top five data analysts to follow.
