Is your current Business Intelligence tool agile?

Posted by: Yellowfin Team

Modern Business Intelligence (BI) software is as flexible as beloved clay humanoid figure Gumby – the star of the self-titled 233-episode, 35 year long American animated cartoon – or at least it should be.

But how do you assess whether your current reporting and analytics tool(s) is up to the challenge of facilitating an Agile BI program?

Agile BI practices

An Agile BI tool must support Agile BI practices that combine to deliver an overall agile framework.

Organizational practices to support Agile BI rollout include:

  • Promoting widespread organizational access to reporting and analytics
  • Selecting an end-user focused, feature driven BI tool
  • Indentifying and aligning reporting and analytics needs with clearly defined business goals
  • Working in “sprints” to produce bite-sized deliverables in an iterative manner

Assessing the agility of your BI tool

When assessing the agility of your BI tool, ask the following questions:

  • How old is the tool?
  • Do we have an old version of the tool?
  • Does the vendor of this tool use agile development to produce this tool?
  • Is the tool capable of supporting a “scrum” process for delivering reporting and analytics?
  • Does it have the flexibility and scalability to respond quickly to changes in reporting and analytics needs?
  • Is it easy to use – Does it support independent end-user data exploration, report sharing and collaboration?
  • Can it deliver actionable intelligence to appropriate decision-makers quickly?
  • Does it integrate easily with other existing infrastructures and have minimal maintenance requirements?
  • Can it connect to and report off a large range of databases and data sources?

Yellowfin: An Agile BI solution

Yellowfin is well positioned to help businesses address their major reporting and analytics goals and concerns. Yellowfin enables organizations and IT departments across all industries to undertake crucial data analysis quickly, easily and effectively, to support efficient and competitive strategic operational practices.

Yellowfin is the most user-friendly BI tool on the market, with its highly intuitive features encouraging widespread end-user adoption, data interaction, analysis and organization-wide information collaboration and knowledge sharing. Yellowfin’s 100 percent Web-based solution allows for quick and easy navigation and presents reporting in simple business language, not unclear technical language. Yellowfin delivers an outstanding Return on Investment.

Crucial features of an Agile BI tool

Yellowfin provides a world-class Agile BI solution virtually out of the box, offering:

  • A highly intuitive, end-user focused, and 100 percent Web-based interface for easy navigation
  • Personalized dashboards to enable fast role-based decision-making
  • “What if” analysis functionality to assist management conduct precise and low risk strategic planning
  • A meta-data layer to reduce demands on technical personnel and support widespread independent use of reporting and analytics
  • Interactive and easy-to-build reports
  • An in-memory database to support fast and flexible data analysis
  • Customized report delivery and data access
  • A social media style forum to support end-user collaboration and information sharing
  • The ability to connect to and report off a large range of databases (including all tier one databases) and data sources (structured and unstructured) simultaneously
  • A Java based application and single module install process across all platforms for easy deployment into existing technical environments
  • A highly scalable BI tool that can respond to changes in reporting needs
  • A comprehensive, easy to set up, and secure mobile reporting and analytics platform to assist an increasingly disparate workforce remain up-to-date at all times

We then work with our clients to ensure that their specific BI needs and goals are met and that Yellowfin’s BI solution can be integrated and maintained with a minimum of effort.

Conclusion

Flexible, customized and pervasive reporting and analytics solutions can help organizations from any field, industry or sector achieve an Agile BI rollout.

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