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September 26, 2007
Yellowfin in an ITIL world
Anyone who has worked in a company environment knows the frustration that people SILO's create when trying to achieve tasks that span several groups. Silo structures maintain their own management, tasks, issues, data, knowledge and ideas making cross-silo co-operation diffcult. These tribal silos are based on skill sets, which means they’re based on personal histories, professional affiliations, and common job language. These natural barriers are further entrenched by internal silo protocols that create defendable barriers to external groups.
Organizations are now realising the need to manage effectively across tribal silos far more aggressively than in the past.
Silo groups are both the building blocks and bugbears of organizations; The old skill-group model has reached its use by date, modern organizations now require a more holistic approach (witness ITIL) to the delivery of services. While the individual skill sets must remain, reinforcing them with rigid organizational boundaries and siloed processes must change.
As Money is the primary reason for business, successful organisations look for ways to maximize revenue by increasing sales of products and services to new and existing customers. To stand out in a commoditized market place, organisations must understand what customers truly value and to do that they must unite internal resources to improve delivery to customers.
Management cannot just demand internal groups co-operate as modest initial changes will quickly evapourate. Management must foster change and support those changes through active management, new applications, shared data flows, centralized data storage, shared processes, culture shifts and education. The people who make up the organisation must adopt the mission that the changes they participate in will benefit the organisation through better service delivery and that will drive flow on revenues.
(Supporting Change)
Supporting these new service oriented missions are process architectures like ITIL and data awareness appliances like Yellowfin (Business Intelligence).
ITIL, which is being widely adopted today, specifies more effective cross-silo collaboration to improve processes across IT systems within the organisation. Originating in the late 1980's in the UK, ITIL® (the IT Infrastructure Library) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL® provides a cohesive set of best practice, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools. ITIL principles are not just limited to the IT department, the core principles extent to all organisation units as information flow and technology have successfully infiltrated all corners of the organisation.
Yellowfin is the industry BI appliance that organisations can roll out quickly to enable wide data knowledge improvements. Yellowfin has taken a fresh approach to information delivery by focusing on how people interact. The great failing of traditional reporting products is that they have delivered technology rather than business oriented solutions. The tools available have created barriers between those people with business expertise and the data they need to make decisions.
Yellowfin realised early that collaborative technologies are core to how people will interact within organisations in the future. The key elements of successful collaborative solutions will have both presence; (to allow communities of people to interact), and persistence; (which will enable a memory or continuity of that interaction).
Collaborative architectures like ITIL can deliver productivity improvements, but the true transformational changes can only occur when stakeholders have access to critical information as they need it. Yellowfin enables fast adoption in organisations by integrating tightly with existing data stores and applications. People don't just want another application they have to login to, they want tools that make sense, make their job easier/smarter and support their current practical day to day decisions.
Data and Knowledge awareness does not need to be complicated. Simple to use tools, providing access to relevant data is what business users want.
The principles of information collaboration also support cross-silo collaboration
* Easy access to data
* Tools that are easy to use
* Wider adoption of tools across all stakeholder groups
* Expert user identification
* Work flow
* Corporate publishing
* Work groups
* Dashboards
An enterprise reporting solution like Yellowfin is ideal in situations where questions are predefined and the structure of each answer is fairly well known in advance. In this case, the majority of users are information consumers who get snapshots of business activity. Business experts create reports that answer the most regularly-asked questions and distribute them to hundreds or potentially thousands of users.
While ACCESS and EXCEL allow silo groups to analyse small data sets on their desktops, these applications are not designed to manage larger data problems or wide scale data sharing. The introduction of dashboards and expert reports enhances visibility of organisational strategy, align actions with that strategy, and allows your users to track KPIs, assign goals, and collaborate/share knowledge. Dashboards communicate complex information quickly. They translate corporate data into a rich, graphical presentation using gauges, maps, charts, and other graphics to show multiple results together. Dynamic dashboards also let you drill-through to other data sources and reports for more detail about what the dashboard shows you.
Dashboards and enterprise report support cross silo processes via:
* Employee accountability - as they take ownership of their performance through improved visibility.
* Deliver at-a-glance information - Dashboards let people see immediately how the company, business unit or individual is performing in its critical areas.
* Communicate strategy effectively - Supporting business processes by expressing important information, key drivers, performance expectations, and the results - to make strategy relevant to everyone.
* Monitor performance against targets: Track critical performance measures in real time.
* Support Collaboration - Corporate performance metrics makes visible the impact one department has on another leading to proactive cooperation among different areas.
Posted by Justin Hewitt at 6:00 AM | Comments (0)
Mashup, BIRT, Yellowfin and ANN for advanced business intelligence
Security solutions provider EXTOL MSC Berhad has developed a neural network predictive analysis engine and is now working with Australian business intelligence company Yellowfin to develop a front end that is integrated with Yellowfin’s reporting, that can be delivered to clients.
Under the tie up, Yellowfin will make the new engine called "Artificial Neural Networks" (ANN) available with its business intelligence solution for local and international markets. Users will have a highly insightful predictive solution to access optimized results from their business processes, according to EXTOLS MSC's chief executive officer Justin Tan
Tan said, with the ANN technology, users are able to have a computing system that resembles the human brain in acquiring knowledge through self-learning. Currently, humans are assisted to perform various complex tasks. ANN has the capability to address problems that are difficult or impossible to resolve by traditional computational and statistics methods. This technology can be deployed for face recognition, IP clustering, geo-location analysis, credit card processing, fraud detection, human resource application, vehicle traffic management, postal industry, market research data mining or any data sample in a complex environment that needs behavior analysis.
According to Tan, Extol is looking for more partners from various industries to bundle the ANN technology into their products.
We are already advanced in talking to two new potential partners and we expect the mature markets that are already utilizing ANN to be interested in incorporating this solution into their application," he said.
A similar concept to optimization, Tan said the ANN plus Yellowfin solution will benefit most industries to optimize the use of their resources to achieve desirable results.
Additionally the response time in producing the desired output is faster. In the financial sector, by incorporating the ANN engine with an active rules based system, we are able to increase the detection of legitimate fraud transactions in a shorter time period”.
Extol has been aggressively involved in artificial intelligence research and is currently working on a new ANN generation that operates on pattern recognition rather than rules. This will play an important role in providing intelligence to computer systems.
Yellowfin's CEO, Glen Rabie said the company has an established presence in the local financial, insurance and telecommunications industries. "We believe the collaboration with Extol will allow us to better serve clients in these industries. With ANN predictive analysis, customers will be attracted to this new technology as it gives the potential to save time, reduce costs and substantially drive business revenue"
Posted by Justin Hewitt at 6:00 AM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2007
Quantum Compliance System picks up Yellowfin.
MI, Quantum Compliance System, Inc. is pleased to announce a new business partnership with Yellowfin International to resell their Yellowfin business intelligence suite in the United States to product developers and other resellers.
Yellowfin is a business Intelligence suite built on the foundation of J2EE, incorporating, BIRT, Jasper, Spring, JFreeChart. The JAVA core makes Yellowfin a powerful, flexible and robust solution for database reporting.
Yellowfin allows customers to:
• create, schedule and automatically distribute reports;
• create a custom Dashboard using graphical presentations such as gauges and charts to quickly communicate complex information and track Key Performance Indicators, that can per be personalized by individual users;
• analyze data by drilling down to the details or set data alerts;
• easily integrate with your existing third party SQL-92 database applications.
Quantum Compliance Systems, Inc. (http://www.qcs-facts.com/) is a privately held, profitable operation, with over 100 separately licensed installations. It was founded in 1986, by a team of environmental engineering and computer science professionals who knew “there had to be a better way” based on their direct experience in EH&S. In 1989, Quantum released their flagship product platform named Facility Tracking System (FacTS). This enterprise wide Environmental, Health & Safety Information Management System offers the most comprehensive set of EH&S capabilities, so that with a single vendor relationship, customers can control the entire compliance process across the enterprise.
“The philosophy of QCS Facts that “there had to be a better way” fits in perfectly with the philosophy that drives Yellowfin. We really appreciate the global and strategic outlook of the team at QCS Facts, and believe that they have the right skills and capabilities to deliver excellent value to the market.” Said Glen Rabie, CEO of Yellowfin.
Yellowfin International (http://www.yellowfin.com.au/) was founded to tackle the problems its founders had experienced with more traditional business intelligence (BI) players in the market. Their philosophy drives them to develop products that are easy to use. They have business partners with in Europe, Asia, USA, Canada and Australia/New Zealand
Yellowfin is a trademark of Yellowfin International.
FacTS is a trademark of Quantum Compliance Systems, Inc.
Quantum Compliance Systems, Inc.
www.qcs-facts.com
Posted by Justin Hewitt at 4:45 PM | Comments (0)
