When building and running an organization, it's critical that you trust your data. A statistic that shocked me recently was that 84% of CEOs don't trust the data they’re basing their decisions on. While it’s a common problem, it’s one that’s actually easy to fix.

There's been a lot of discussion around the proliferation of data sources in organizations, and for good reason. There are so many ways to consume data now. When I first started working we would send out paper reports. Then Excel came along and we started sending out spreadsheets. Then organizations tried to control things a bit more, so dashboards were created. While there are more new channels to receive data, none of the older ones have become obsolete.

One of the things I'm really passionate about is data and how it can be used to influence decision-making. But everyone has their own personal biases and opinions that they use to create a narrative and this can affect how they look at data. So even when the data tells us one thing, we may see something completely different.

Data in organizations has become a significant risk issue. In recent years, new risks have emerged that have led many organizations to centralize their data and seek out new ways to mitigate their data risks through tighter data governance. Regulatory change, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the US, have focused on data privacy.

For the 8.0.2 release, the team at Yellowfin have been focussed on increasing overall performance across our products and implemented some of the most requested customer enhancements to improve the analytical user experience. As it is with every release, we’ve also included improvements to reports and charts.

I love data. I live it, I breathe it and I get excited about it. Recently, I started thinking about what creates a data culture when I read the Big Data and AI Executive Survey 2019. It said that 72% of respondents were yet to forge a data culture. While every business uses data in some form, they don’t all use it to truly understand the dynamics of their business and make strategic decisions.

The launch of Signals has been a complete game-changer for us this year. Yellowfin is doing something completely unique in the marketplace and we’re winning some great deals because of it. Signals is an automated data discovery product that delivers alerts to users about critical changes in their business. It’s not about dashboards - this is a completely different way of consuming analytics.

As an innovative company, Yellowfin is focused on delivering new products to market, not just incrementally improving what we have. If you're a software company looking to build your own innovation strategy, there are some things that you need to do, and a few you shouldn’t, to make sure you're successful. The first thing you shouldn’t do is look at your competitors. Many software companies have one great idea and then they stop.

I often get asked why Yellowfin is always the first to market with new products - it’s because of our innovation culture. Our innovation is something that we’ve even been recognized for by BARC and Gartner. Here are three things that we do to create a culture of innovation that enables us to live and breathe new ideas.

There's an incredible amount of hype about AI today. Consumer use cases like self-driving cars and robotics have captured people’s imaginations and shown them that they can make a huge leap with innovation rather than an incremental change. That shift in thinking is exciting, but there’s also a lot of FOMO around AI that means businesses are just trying to tick a box rather than thinking more deeply about how they can use automation to improve their business.