One of the best things about my job is that I get to continually scan the industry and learn about who’s driving innovation (see my predictions for 2018 here). As a result, I see five key trends emerging in the analytics space over the next year.
When most people think of Business Intelligence, they think of dashboards. But despite the fact that dashboards are the default approach to BI, there are a range of business use cases today where dashboards are failing (miserably).
As an entrepreneur and a CEO of a startup, I think it’s vital to have a mentor. You often come to critical junctures and that’s when it can be invaluable to speak to someone. You can’t talk to your colleagues though because you need to motivate them and keep the organization growing. That’s why having an external mentor is very helpful.
Continuing my series of blogs examining the products, services and client benefits borne out of Yellowfin’s partnerships, I’m pleased to introduce our new fintech partner, ChartIQ. ChartIQ provides HTML5 components and the Finsemble integration platform to banks, brokerages, trading platforms, and financial portals worldwide.
One question that I’m often asked is ‘how do I justify funding for a BI project?’ The answer I give is that to win funding you need to stop thinking about BI as a project.
Recently I watched a video by Mico Yuk where she explains her approach to BI storyboarding. Mico Yuk is well-known in the BI space specifically around SAP and Lumira. She runs her own consultancy predominantly helping SAP customers build out BI projects for their own internal use cases.
Yellowfin has always been a data-focused organisation. But for far too long our finance team has relied on Excel as their core mechanism for analyzing our business. Recently, that’s changed at Yellowfin thanks to our new CFO, Keith Bold. Keith really understands the power of data and wanted to empower the finance team to join the rest of our organisation who use BI every day.
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.
