Yellowfin & Macquarie Uni announced 2011 Excellence in BI Award finalists
Australian Higher Education provider, Macquarie University, a client of Australian-based global Business Intelligence (BI) vendor, Yellowfin, has been announced as one of six finalists for the inaugural 2011 Excellence in Business Intelligence Award.
The award, coordinated by The Australian Business Intelligence Leadership Forum (ABILF), was open to any organization or vendor that delivered or participated in the delivery of a BI project within Australia since 1 July 2010.
Award Steering Committee head, Hanne Breddam, said in a statement announcing the finalists that: “We were extremely pleased to have had such a strong response and a range of high quality entries. On behalf of the Award Committee, I would like to thank all those companies and individuals who have participated in this year’s Award and offer our congratulations to all our finalists on their outstanding achievements.”
Award winners will be announced at the Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing 2.0 Conference, 26 October 2011, Sydney, Australia. Conference attendees will have an opportunity to nominate finalists for the People’s Choice Award.
Register for the conference here: http://www.enterpriseiq.com.au/bi-a-dw-20-summit
Yellowfin nominated Macquarie after helping implement and deliver the university’s self-service reporting and analytics solution, rebranded as Datamart.
“We have enabled Macquarie University staff from across research, teaching, finance, operations and executive functional areas embrace BI,” said Yellowfin Director, Justin Hewitt. “Macquarie’s ability to deploy and harness Yellowfin’s market-leading Location Intelligence (LI), collaborative and mobile components provides an innovate example of a successful, user-oriented BI deployment.
“Yellowfin is helping Macquarie obtain a competitive advantage in the Australian Higher Education space.”
Macquarie Chief Information Officer, Marc Bailey commented: “Yellowfin provides visibility of critical data sets for government reporting and the people at Macquarie with the information they need to offer the best services possible and develop winning research, teaching and business strategies.”
Macquarie harnesses Collaborative BI, Mobile BI and LI
Macquarie is using Yellowfin’s unique collaborative functionality to share BI content within the BI application and on platforms separate to Yellowfin, such as the university wiki, to enable better, faster collective fact-based decision-making.
Bailey also said that as a university, with a dispersed workforce that accesses information via a range of different devices, Yellowfin’s multi-platform, multi-device self-service capabilities were paramount.
“The second thing that we saw as a major benefit was the fact that Yellowfin is one of the only BI products on the market with the ability to utilize HTML 5, and therefore receive information on any device or platform.
“Widespread self-service access to reporting and analytics is vital for our success as a university, and Yellowfin delivers that.”
In addition, Macquarie Information Director, Dr Neil Fraser, said that Yellowfin’s LI technology is enabling Macquarie to analyse large location-based datasets to uncover questions, answers and opportunities at a micro and macro level.
“We can now accurately map where our students are coming from and develop effective marketing strategies accordingly,” said Fraser. “For example we can monitor student intake around the world or traffic flow around the campus. We can even analyze where our funding comes from based on locality – the opportunities are limitless.
“Being able to visualize our data is key to discovering these types of problems and opportunities.”
About the Excellence in Business Intelligence Award
The purpose of the Excellence in Business Intelligence Award is to increase awareness and improve practices amongst decision-makers across Australian organizations to use information to create insight. It honours companies that have demonstrated success in establishing, maintaining and using BI to drive business outcomes. Submissions are judged across four criteria: Business impact, Maturity, Innovation and Relevance to other organizations.
The panel of judges for the inaugural award includes many well-known and respected industry experts, including Bill Inmon (“The Father of Data Warehousing”, President & Chief Technology Officer, Forest Rim Technology LLC), Hanne Breddam (TDWI President (Australian Chapter) and CEO, Business Minds) and Wayne Eckerson (Founder & President, BI Leadership Forum).
Award winners will be announced at the Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing 2.0 Conference, 25-27 October 2011, Sydney, Australia. The winner receives: Recognition by the ABILF, free entry to Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing 2.0 Conference, publication of the project and critique from the judges.
Yellowfin is currently deployed to 240 staff throughout Macquarie, and will be progressively rolled-out to a wider population of 1200, eventually offering staff and even students access to a wide range of operational university data, subject to security.
The other five finalists include Commonwealth Bank, Deloitte, IAG, Telstra and University of Wollongong.
About Yellowfin
Yellowfin is a global Business Intelligence (BI) software vendor headquartered and developed in Melbourne, Australia. Yellowfin is a highly intuitive 100 percent Web-based reporting and analytics solution.
About the ABILF
The Australian Business Intelligence Leadership Forum (ABILF) was established in 2009. Members lead BI activities in their organizations which span various sectors. The forum is facilitated by Business Minds and quarterly meetings are hosted by a participating organization. Succinct presentations are made by members on BI or related topics, followed by open discussion to:
- Share best practice
- Discuss pragmatic approaches to solving issues
For further media information, interviews, images or product demonstration, please contact:
Lachlan James, Communications Manager on +61 03 9090 0454, 0431 835 658 or lachlan.james@yellowfin.bi
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