Yellowfin’s Business Analytics Workflow a “welcome development” for BI industry says Devlin
Yellowfin’s introduction of a unique Business Analytics Workflow within its Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics software platform – to facilitate superior collaboration between data analysts and business users – has been described as a “welcome development” for the BI industry by independent analyst and thought leader, Dr Barry Devlin.
The comments were made as part of an article penned by Devlin on eckerson.com. The full article, titled Closed-Loop Decision Making, can be found HERE >
“The BI market today places significant emphasis on discovery, self-service and other related aspects of users’ decision-making behavior,” said Devlin. “This focus tends to de-emphasize another area of BI functionality that I have long believed to be vitally important to business success: a closed-loop process that spans from information gathering and use through to decision-making, action taking, and back again to information.”
Describing this process as the MEDA model of organizational decision-making – Monitor, Evaluate, Decide and Act – Devlin said that Yellowfin’s Business Analytics Workflow “provided an interesting collaboration-based function that aligns well with the model outlined above.”
“While much of the current industry focus is on the interactive aspects of BI – discovery, visualization and storytelling, for example – a process-oriented focus can be seen emerging here,” continued Devlin. “Yellowfin allows a business user to direct tasks to IT, including requests for changes to existing reports, notifications of data quality issues, and so on. Linked to other collaborative functionality such as Discussion Boards, polling and Timelines, we see the first foundation for the type of workflow and process choreography for decision-making that I have previously described in Business unintelligence.”
Devlin also commented specifically on Yellowfin’s Task Management capabilities contained within the Yellowfin Business Workflow, including Smart Tasks, which improve accountability and instantly turn insight into action by automatically generating tasks from Yellowfin broadcasts.
“Smart Tasks allow actions to be assigned to people and their progress tracked to completion,” said Devlin. “These tasks can be initiated by business users directly from a dashboard or report or they can be triggered by some predefined trigger in an automated report or dashboard. This latter aspect maps directly to the monitoring phase of MEDA above. The task itself offers the direct link to action. The action could be to request a deeper analysis in the evaluation phase, to offer options from evaluation to the decision phase, or to initiate specific business actions in the final phase of the MEDA loop.”
The Yellowfin Business Workflow provides a clear path and process for business users to directly connect with the BI and data experts in their organization, to raise trackable tasks and data quality issues, brainstorm ideas, collectively review content and take better, faster data-driven action.
“The unique Business Workflow framework in Yellowfin 7.2 empowers business users and data analysts to work collaboratively to produce better business insights,” said Yellowfin CEO and Co-Founder, Glen Rabie. “Crucially, it also enables the entire data-driven decision-making process to take place in the BI platform – where it belongs.”
For more detail on Yellowfin’s Business Workflow and Task Management functionality, GO HERE >
Industry expert and Associate Analyst at Bloor Research, David Norris, said that Yellowfin’s collaborative Business Workflow framework addressed an important gap in the BI market. Read Norris’ write-up HERE >
Blue Hill Research Principal Analyst, James Haight, found that Yellowfin’s Business Workflow made “a meaningful impact on creating a BI culture where persistent user adoption creates long-term value”. Find out why HERE >
Dr Barry Devlin is a founder of the data warehousing industry, defining its first architecture in 1985. A foremost authority on BI and Big Data with over 30 years’ experience in the IT industry, Devlin is respected worldwide as a visionary and thought-leader.
About Yellowfin
Yellowfin is a global Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics software vendor passionate about making BI easy. Founded in 2003 in response to the complexity and costs associated with implementing and using traditional BI tools, Yellowfin is a highly intuitive 100 percent Web-based reporting and analytics solution. Yellowfin is a leader in mobile, collaborative and embedded BI, as well as Location Intelligence and data visualization.
Over 10,000 organizations, and more than 2 million end-users across 70 different countries, use Yellowfin every day. For more information, visit www.yellowfinbi.com
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For further media information, interviews, images or product demonstration, please contact:
Lachlan James, Yellowfin Global Communications Manager on +61 (0)3 8617 4954, +61 (0)431 835 658 or lachlan.james@yellowfin.bi