There's a strong perception that numbers will simply drive action but they don't. Look at most dashboards and they’re designed to tell you about your data but they don’t prompt you to do anything with it. That’s the missing piece in dashboard design.
The last 12 months have been tremendous for Yellowfin. We’ve introduced Signals, Stories, a new dashboard build, mobile app and many new improvements to the platform. There is no one else in the market that brings together all of these types of products and it means we’re diverging from our competitors. Our competitors think far more about the analytical experience, while we care about the data consumer and build products for them.
Seek, who is one of our customers, came to us with a laundry list of functionality that their developers wanted. Like many enterprises, they have their own developers who are asked to deliver a design for their UX team and they need and environment where they can do that. They didn’t want us to worry about the UI, they just wanted the ability to code what they wanted directly into the Yellowfin dashboard environment, so we created Yellowfin 9 Code Mode which is our developer platform.
Do more with your dashboards. If, like me, you are someone who uses data to make decisions (what we call a business user), I suspect your experience with analytics and in particular dashboards is mixed verging on the ‘not that great’.
The next Yellowfin release is absolutely huge. We’ve focused on the experience of data consumers within organizations with three new features - code mode for dashboards, Present and our new mobile app.
Not so long ago, our CFO was looking at changing our financial system and it reminded me of a similar situation that happened when I worked at National Australia Bank many years ago. We changed our entire ERP because the organization needed to slice and dice their data differently. What they could have done instead was use analytics differently to extend the life of the products they had, so that’s what we’ve done.
When it comes to automation in the BI industry, I think a lot of vendors are holding back. It’s entirely possible to automate the majority of what data analysts do today, but vendors are reluctant to do this because it would impact data analysts and they’re a big gatekeeper in the buying cycle of analytic software.
Innovation in the BI industry died about 30 years ago. Sure the colors and format may be different but what’s delivered to business users is exactly the same and that's a real problem. I think this is because the industry spends more time thinking about how to make a data analyst’s life easier rather than helping business users get the most value from their data.
As a vendor of dashboards, I know it’s really important how people use them to effectively communicate their data to end-users. But I believe a well-designed dashboard is a rare thing.
People often ask me, what's the difference between Yellowfin and our competitors? The truth is I try not to look at what our competitors are doing. That’s because we focus on different end-users to our competitors.
