Yellowfin 7 aims to enhance collaborative BI capabilities

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: Global Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics software vendor, Yellowfin, is set to introduce new collaborative decision capabilities as part of its latest BI platform, Yellowfin 7. Yellowfin 7 will be launched in a series of live Webinars throughout Monday 25 and Tuesday 26 November 2013.

A series of decision widgets will be included in Timeline - Yellowfin's personalized Facebook-esc feed, which catalogs a users' activities within Yellowfin in real-time - to boost user engagement and make collaborative decision-making even easier.

"With collaboration and Yellowfin's Timeline, you can comment on reports and create discussion topics that allow you to share ideas and data over time - as you would in a real ongoing discussion," said Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie. "In Yellowfin 7, we have also added the ability to make collaborative decisions, and record those decisions in order to improve the quality and transparency of organizational decision-making."

Rabie said it was important to introduce functionality into a BI platform that empowered users to intuitively turn insight and discussion into action.

"Without a decision, there's no ROI for analytic software," said Rabie. "So a BI solution needs to be more than just an enabler. For BI software to be successful, it must include a mechanism to assist decision-making, such as voting or polling, to help push conversation towards a specific, measurable and desirable course of action. That's exactly what we're helping our customers achieve with Yellowfin 7."

Rabie said that Yellowfin 7's collaborative features were designed to replicate natural decision-making processes.

"In Yellowfin 7, not only will users be able to engage in discussion threads and embed BI content into those discussions, they'll be able to set resolution deadlines as well as vote on proposed actions."

According to research reported by Information Management, organizations that embraced and implemented best practice Collaborative BI enjoyed a 44 percent boost in customer responsiveness, a 42 percent improvement in employee productivity, a 30 percent increase in business process efficiency, and a 40 percent rise in BI adoption.

Yellowfin was identified as the leading Collaborative BI dashboard vendor in BARC's The BI Survey 12 - the world's largest end-user BI study. Yellowfin will host three Yellowfin 7 release Webinars throughout November 25-26 2013.