December 13, 2022
5
min read

2022, A Year in Review

By YOOI CEO, Nicolas Averseng

2022 has been an exciting and intense year for YOOI.

We’ve achieved great things, learned where we could’ve done better, and shared many good moments with the Data & Analytics community (and as a team).

We’d like to share some most notable moments the YOOI team had in 2022.

We love (in-person) events

In-person events are great opportunities to share, get feedback, meet peers and identify new opportunities with prospects & partners.

We have been able to join many offline events this year, and here are some of the highlights:

  • We were at Big Data & AI Paris for the 2nd year.
  • We did our first steps in the UK with the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit EMEA as well as Big Data London.
  • We sponsored the inaugural CDOIQ Europe conference in Lausanne.
  • We made our debut in Canada at Big Data Toronto with a workshop about how to implement the “Thinking like a data scientist” methodology (from Bill Schmarzo) with YOOI and a pitch.
  • And we made the US first know about YOOI as we were selected to pitch at Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Orlando, FL.

Events are always a strong growth engine and meet-up opportunities: we’ve expanded our reach this year and expect even more in 2023!

Virtual connections are great too

Other than offline presences, we also joined or organized webinars this year to exchange with Data & Analytics experts on the value of Data & Analytics

We guested at The Lights On Data Show with the hosts George and Diana Firican. We’re also on The Ravit Show with round table guests Adam Votava, Interim CDOA of DataDiligence, and Megan C. Brown, Ph.D., Director at the Global Center of Excellence for advanced analytics and data science at Starbucks. On top of them, we hosted our first webinar with Douglas Laney.

Those have been great opportunities to emphasize how to create value from Data & Analytics and why value management should be part of the data strategy.

In short, our earnest suggestion is to keep a value-driven mindset for Data & Analytics. Data & Analytics investments need to be tied closely to the desired business outcome (revenue increase, competitive advantages, cost-saving…), and to be managed as a portfolio.

Our platform is awesome

2022 was a year of strengthening our platform: more portfolio analysis capabilities with improved visualization and computing,  expanding governance capabilities, introducing flexible automation capabilities and much more. All while making sure we have top-notch security in place.

In the coming months, we will reinforce our focus on making the platform more user-friendly for non-data teams and continue adding powerful features (the sky is the limit!).

YOOI strengthened our platform capabilities for better portfolio management, workflow governance, integration, and automation.

Analyze your portfolio performance across all dimensions

In order to get the most from the knowledge graph and to build a consolidated analysis suitable for all stakeholders, we have extended our library of visualizations and combined them with multidimensional computing capabilities - including for time series capturing historical information. Dashboards are now even more powerful and dynamic.

The graph visualization also enables our users to understand value streams and impacts.

Orchestrate your governance processes end-to-end

To enable governance on the full lifecycle of D&A investments, and across all stakeholders, we now support multiple workflows per concept - which remain fully configurable and can easily be nested. It is now easy to request validations from multiple committees, approve project gates, and orchestrate your governance processes end-to-end.

Integrate & automate

To continue our focus on building the cockpit for the D&A program and bringing visibility & alignment across the complexity of existing ecosystems, we have strengthened our integration capabilities: we improved our dynamic & bidirectional APIs and simplified their use. Thanks to our brand new automation engine, it is even simpler to add rules and customize actions - including across systems.

Our star team grows

The YOOI team in 2022.

This year, our team continued to grow.

We invited Lara Khanafer to join us as a Chief Revenue Officer to boost our sales and marketing efforts.

Our first dedicated customer success manager joined the team to support the onboarding and growth of our clients, also to gather their feedback and translate it into product development ideas.

And we had 3 new developers joining the engineering team, to balance between supporting customer requests and continuously developing new features according to our roadmap.

Last but not least, we took pleasure in having 3 awesome interns on the team to bring some fresh insights and ideas in product development and UI/UX.

It’s always pleasant to have new blood in the team and see the synergy between all our talents! Every one of them makes YOOI powerful and ready for the future.

The key takeaway of the year

While this has taken several years to mature, a very large percentage of organizations are now convinced that they need to deploy data governance: deploy a data catalog, define policies and processes, setup the governance roles and responsibilities. Hence the boom of data catalog & data governance platforms.

But data governance is not enough. On top of the intrinsic risks carried by data itself, comes additional risks (ethical, environmental, security, etc.) induced by the usage of those data: algorithms, machine learning and AI models, new ways to expose the data, advanced analysis in reports, etc. And upcoming regulations, like the EU AI Act, are coming and organizations should be ready to face the challenge in the coming months.

With the widespread pressure on costs and profitability as well as growing uncertainties, organizations are required to have more business agility. Deploying a value-driven strategy becomes a critical step for 2023, in order to really achieve end-to-end governance of Data & Analytics investments.

And finally, I am very grateful for Orange who has accepted to be our first public reference and to share their story with us at the Gartner D&A Summit in May. We have a great collaboration, and it has been awesome to support them in their journey. They are one of the pioneers in driving their D&A strategy by value in a systematic way while addressing the challenges of ethical AI.

Goals for 2023

Looking forward to 2023, we aim to focus our growth in the EU and the UK, but opportunities are all around the world :)

We also plan to continue building partnerships with consulting companies, as we have strong synergies for our customers. We know organizations often need consulting on their strategies and their operating model, and YOOI is the perfect platform to support and scale those efforts efficiently, maximizing their value.

We know it is going to be a bumpy ride with many uncertainties in the world economy. Still, we are confident Data & Analytics remain at the core of organizations' requirements to improve their performance, optimize their costs and address their sustainability challenges.

Value-driven mindset and end-to-end Data & Analytics governance are going to be more and more critical in the coming months, and we will continue spreading the message and supporting our customers for success!

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