BI that dazzles in data analysis AND visualisation

The purpose of a business intelligence (BI) solution is to extract value from data. The ability to do so hinges both on getting to insights quickly and communicating them in an engaging and intuitive way. But while most modern BI solutions excel in one respect, they fail in the other.

Enabling the user
The consumerisation of BI has been gathering pace of late in a bid to meet spiking demand from a growing pool of users and ever more diverse business cases.

Increasingly, the focus has been on enabling end-users through front-end design rather than data analysis itself. This led Gartner to comment in 2011 that ease-of use had become more important to buyers than even powerful functionality (2011).

…while empowering IT
But notwithstanding the sense of this approach, BI that caters disproportionately to the needs of the business over those of data analysts and IT is counterproductive.

If you don’t enable the behind-the-scenes processes – think data quality, data preparation and governance – BI’s outputs will suffer.

As a result, says research organisation TDWI, BI absorption has remained low in the enterprise at just 20% of potential users in 2008. By 2016 this figure has actually fallen to 17%, according to The BI Survey 16. In five short years, data quality and data management had again become just as important as data discovery and data visualisation.

With these trends coming to fruition, what does modern BI look like?

Data preparation – the brains
As concerns the renewed focus on data quality, data management and governance, data preparation is emerging as the most vital capability for ensuring BI success.

TDWI’s 2016 BI best practice report has found that 40% of BI users are dissatisfied with the processes used to prepare their data for reporting and analysis. As a result, 58% aren’t happy with the data itself, leading 73% to spend 41% to 100% of their time on preparation work instead of data analysis or report building.

Data visualisation – the beauty
Alongside this trend, the arrival of complex data sets on the BI scene has required the development of advanced visualisation methods in modern tools to continue the trend of catering for ordinary users.

With big data, competitive intelligence and predictive analytics all entering the equation, mere numbers on a one-dimensional surface no longer suffice. Number presentations take up too much space and too much time to assimilate, taxing even the most powerful hardware resources and potentially leading to the wrong conclusions.

Numbers further cannot reveal patterns or dimensions (data attributes), so advanced presentation techniques have evolved to show data in pictorial or graphical format, enabling decision makers to grasp difficult concepts and identify new patterns.

With interactive visualisation, users can go one step further, drilling down into visual elements for more detail and to change the data they see and how it’s processed.

Yellowfin delivers the holy grail
Global BI and analytics vendor Yellowfin has addressed these developments in its latest BI platform, Yellowfin 7.3, with advanced new data preparation and visualisation capabilities coming at no extra cost to clients.

The major enhancements in Yellowfin 7.3 include:
• A built-in data preparation module
• Advanced data visualisation
• Beautiful infographics and dashboards

Gustav Piater, Sales and Marketing Director of AIGS, the South African distributor of Yellowfin BI, says no other BI tool has integrated data preparation capabilities. “It empowers clients to integrate and act on more data sources in less time. As a result, organisations will be able to improve data governance, build better reports and produce deeper insights faster,” he says.

On the data visualisation front, Yellowfin 7.3 offers set analysis functionality, enabling data analysts to quickly define and compare a subset of values within a data set, using intuitive point-and-click navigation. “This allows decision makers to quickly compare subsets within a data set without deep technical knowledge or complex calculation, answering some of the most critical queries organisations ask of their data,” says Piater.

A new free-form content creation canvas further gives users the flexibility to quickly create code-free customised analytical content

Lastly, the infographic presentation layer in 7.3 is very strong, lending credence to the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words (or tens of thousands of data points).

“This collection of capabilities is the holy grail of modern BI, satisfying the needs of all groups in the BI equation, and has great potential to increase penetration of BI in the enterprise,” Piater concludes.