How can you enable self-service BI deployments by enhancing administrative functionality?
The Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics industry, as a whole, continues to place a lot of emphasis on end-user usability. It’s widely accepted by the global business analytics community that boosting product ease-of-use is essential in order to attain high adoption rates and pervasive deployments – BI’s Holy Grail.
But it seems that, amidst this intense focus, other important BI stakeholders have been forgotten – or at least accidentally neglected.
Self-service BI: Don’t forgot the needs of Enterprise IT
As industry expert Wayne Eckerson articulated in an article for SearchBusinessAnalytics.com, a successful self-service BI implementation still requires robust management and administration.
Eckerson went onto say that efficacious self-service BI does not equate to a one-size-fits-all approach, but requires support from IT to effectively segment and meet the needs of separate user groups and efficiently manage the optimal use of the overall BI environment.
Essentially, Eckerson sums it up like this: “A lot of companies find self-service BI harder to do than they thought.”
For the upcoming release of Yellowfin 7, we thought about this – hard. At Yellowfin, we focus our efforts on the BI consumer. Those people who usually come from non-data-centric backgrounds, and just want to harness fact-based insights to make better decisions within their functional role – be it marketing, finance, sales or something completely different.
But, to help the everyday BI consumer and enable widespread BI usage, we realize that we’ve got to offer IT the support, security and data governance they require to easily and efficiently administer such BI deployments. Enter Yellowfin 7’s all-new Administration Console.
Yellowfin 7: Introducing the new Administration Console
The Administration Console has been completely overhauled, from the ground up, to make it easier and faster for administrators to access, enact and manage all administrative components within Yellowfin.
Why did we go to all this trouble?
Out with the old…
Well, admittedly, the old administration interface had a few issues. In particularly, many of the key admin features were disconnected and scattered throughout the application.
For example, say you were an administrator under previous versions of Yellowfin. If you wanted to manage your users, you would first have to navigate to the "General" admin page. Once there, you had to click on the "User Management" link.
The navigation pattern described above was used to access all key administrative components:
- Go to the general admin page
- Click on the desired component
- Be redirected to a separate page for that component
The point is, you weren’t able to access key management functions from a single place. Not only were they dispersed; administrators were required to complete several actions to access the desired functionality.
The end result was a sub-optimal user experience for our administrators. It also conveyed the undesirable impression that the admin modules within Yellowfin were simply made up of many separate features, which were sticky taped together, to make an overall set of management functions.
What was absent, was some sort of ‘magic glue’ to unify all the components…
In with the new.
The new Admin Console has been designed to address and fix the issues of old by:
- Compiling core administrative components together to provide a single unified view
- Using JavaScript and Ajax to dynamically navigate between components
The end result? A much faster, simpler user experience for all the Yellowfin administrators out there.
Enterprise ready BI
The revamped administrative functionality in Yellowfin 7 enables those managing their BI deployment to:
- Reduce the time and resources spent on administering Yellowfin
- Avoid getting weighed down by thankless administrative tasks, and spend more time generating business value through new data analysis and report creation
The new Admin Console will also keep Yellowfin administers better informed about the health of their BI environment. New usage metrics – including the number of users, logins as well as reports and dashboards accessed – enable administrators to instantly gain deeper insights into the habits and practices of BI users, allowing them to:
- More easily understand the overall performance of their BI deployment
- More easily cater for the needs of different user types and groups