Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I spent last Sunday and Monday in Atlanta. I didn’t see much of the city as I was holed up in a downtown hotel with 250 of my closest friends 🙂 working on plans for ASUG’s coming year. There were a number of interesting things that came out of the meeting. I already posted about the location and dates for the fall conference. There are a few other tidbits that I wanted to share as well. In no particular order…

The ASUG board of directors announced that they intend to open a new seat dedicated to a Business Objects customer. This board position is intended to be filled by a customer that is not running any SAP enterprise products but has heavily invested in Business Objects technology. If you are a dedicated Business Objects customer and have a high-level executive that would be interested in sharing your viewpoint with the rest of the board and ensuring that your voice is heard then ASUG wants to hear from you.

I am no longer a member of the GBN steering committee. I didn’t get fired 🙂 there just isn’t a need for that group anymore. However, ASUG has asked each of the steering committee members to stay on in a new role: I am now a Global Ambassador for Business Objects within ASUG. Or something like that. There were some details about the new ambassador program released at the planning meeting, but I expect that a more formal press release might be coming out at some point once the program has more details. In an interesting twist the global ambassadors (former steering committee members) have also been granted SAP Mentor status, which I already had. I certainly feel that’s a positive step because in my experience the Mentor program has remained primarily focused on the SAP enterprise products. The amount of content related to “classic” Business Objects products and services has been in the minority.

There were several activities going on in parallel during the summit. One group was focused on finalizing the selections for the spring ASUG conference which is co-located with SAPPHIRE in Orlando. Another group was working on plans for year-round content such as webinars. There were discussions about the influence councils. (I asked about the results from the Web Intelligence influence council from last year and was told it was essentially done and was being reviewed by the legal department. Hopefully we’ll see something soon.) I am assuming that a next step will be to request abstracts for the fall conference and repeat the planning process for that event.

I did a bit of work tonight on BOB to remove the GBN logo from the user profile screen. It has been replaced by an ASUG profile icon instead. I also swapped out the GBN logo from the sidebar of my blog and replaced it with the ASUG logo and a link to the organization home page. This will be my last blog post that gets the “GBN” tag as well.