Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I have been selected to present two topics at the 2009 GBN conference (which is back in Dallas again this year). For one of them I will revive the “variables” series and present a new set of fun things to do with Webi variables. 🙂 For the second I will revisit and expand upon a single topic from one of my older Universe Designer presentations: working with recursive data. The entire talk will revolve around the challenges and various solutions that can be used to represent recursive data via a universe. It’s a bit specialized, but I hope folks will find it useful.

If you haven’t made plans for the conference yet, I hope you will consider it. If your manager won’t approve a convention as a budget expense this year, consider it a training opportunity instead. 🙂

I’m back in Dallas… finally. I started my day getting to the airport about 9:00 AM Friday morning in Sydney, and ended the day at about 9:00 PM Friday evening in Dallas. That’s 12 hours + 15 hour time difference or 27 total hours travelling. 😯 It didn’t help that my flight departing Sydney was delayed because it took several hours to replace some batteries on the plane, which ultimately resulted in a missed connection in Los Angeles.

Other than that, the conference was wonderful. I got to meet some long-standing BOB members (and give out some hats!) which I always enjoy. The conference was small compared to the US conferences that I have been to, but that just made it all the more intimate. Despite the time difference (15 hours as mentioned earlier) I had zero issues with jet lag. As regular BOB readers probably know, I don’t keep a consistent sleep schedule, so travelling often does not affect me as much. The conference management team (Eventful Management) was incredible and did everything they could to make me feel welcome and appreciated.

I got to catch up a bit with Timo Elliott (read his comments about the event) and found out that he’s an avid surfer. I also went surfing, believe it or not. I think one of the other surfers (obviously a regular) summed it up best when he said, “Just try to stay out of the way…” 😆

Continue reading “Mastering Business Objects 2009 Review”

The “Mastering Business Objects” conference ended last night, and I do intend to share some tidbits from the conference once I get home. I do want to say that the staff managing the conference did a wonderful job of making me feel comfortable and appreciated. The conference was small, but I would prefer the term intimate as it really felt like everyone got to talk to everyone else. I’ll share some more stories later.

I said, “Do you speak-a my language?”
He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich.

Given what I have read, I don’t intend to try to sample Vegemite while in Sydney next week. However I am very much looking forward to the trip. 😎 If you’re in the Sydney area, I will be at “Mastering Business Objects” on Monday and Tuesday, and then at a local user group session Wednesday morning.

This morning started out well. I had a 7:30 meeting scheduled, which I made because the shuttle bus started running yesterday at 7:00. It turns out this morning they started at 7:30 instead, so I was late. Good start to the day, yes?

I’m listening to the keynote right now. One of the things they do at SAPPHIRE that we don’t do at the Business Objects conferences is they simulcast the keynotes on video screens throughout the conference arena. So I am comfortably sitting in the SAP Mentor corner of the press room, watching the keynote and planning out my schedule for the rest of the day.

First up is a talk from Timo Elliott, who may very well be the Business Objects employee with the longest tenure at this point. Timo is employee #8 🙂 and has had the unique opportunity to watch the BI market mature from inside one of the primary contributing companies for a very long time. I didn’t get to attend many sessions yesterday as the day was taken up by a few meetings, so I hope to see some today. So, back to schedule planning…

I mentioned Explorer in my first post today from SAPPHIRE… I just got out of a session where we got to talk more about Explorer and other emerging technologies from SAP. By the way, does anyone realize that “Explorer” is a recycled product name for Business Objects? In the “old days” the desktop product was licensed as a base module (Reporter) and two add-on modules. One of the add-on modules was the Slice and Dice panel, and the other was the drilling capability. The drilling add-on was named “Explorer” and here we have it again. 🙂

Anyway, one of the gentlemen in that session gave me a card with a URL that I thought I would pass on. It seems that you can take your own data, drop it into Excel, and then upload it to a website where you can then experiment with Explorer on your own data. I haven’t tried it yet, but I certainly plan to. For now, here’s the URL if anyone else wants to give it a shot:

http://goexplore.ondemand.com

To experience SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software with your own data, click the “Register” link, below. Within a few days of your registration, we’ll set you up with an account in your own hosted environment for 21 days – where you can upload datasets, navigate with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, and share your findings with others. Seeing is believing. Test-drive SAP BusinessObjects Explorer today and see your data come to life!

You can get Explorer in one of two modes: it can either be accelerated or not. Without acceleration you apparently get the natural language question capabilities along with the reporting features. The acceleration takes your explorer data and loads it into memory. Having everything in memory makes it quite fast, as you can imagine. 🙂

I got to Orlando easily and safely yesterday (Monday) and spent part of the day relaxing. In fact I relaxed right through the opening speakers which was disappointing because one of the authors of “Freakonomics” was participating, and he’s quite fun to listen to. His book is a very interesting read, especially from a data perspective. My favorite chapters were how they figured out which teachers were cheating on standardized tests, and how sumo wrestlers appear to sometimes throw matches. Maybe that will be another blog post at some point. 🙂

So far this morning I have managed to get checked in and attended the opening keynote. From a Business Objects perspective there wasn’t a lot of information presented, but they did include a couple of nuggets. One of the first items that tweaked my interest was related to a new initiative related to measuring the performance of the SAP Enterprise Support group. As anyone who has worked with Business Objects for any length of time probably knows, support is frequently a topic of great interest. 🙂 (I’ve seen both good and bad, and again that’s not the point of this post.) The general tone for the presentation was all about “clarity” and in the support arena it seems that they’re going to be publishing KPIs related to how their support group is doing. That sounded good, but…

First, it seems it’s only for SAP support at this time, not Business Object product support specifically. From talking to an SAP customer there is some additional software they’re required to buy (yes, buy, it’s not free) in order to participate in the program. It’s software that helps SAP support engineers get into your systems and help diagnose issues, and also make sure you’re up to date on patches and so on. If you don’t run this software, then I suppose (and most of this is subject to later verification) you’re not part of the system and your data won’t be used to feed the KPIs.

I’m going to try to find the press release (I assume there is one) and read more about it, but I thought that it was worth sharing for now.

They also did a brief demo of Explorer (rebranded Polestar product). It was rather amusing, as the product was introduced as “… so easy a CEO could use it…” and so, in fact, he did. The CEO participated in the demo showing just how easy it was to take a natural language question (Intelligent Question, anybody? 🙂 ) and enter it into the sytem. From there a search is performed to determine the best place to answer the question. Ultimately a report was generated. It was all very sexy 🙂 and of course they didn’t bother to discuss all of the work that goes into the background to make it all function.

From a Business Objects perspective there wasn’t anything dramatic that was announced or covered in the keynote. Obviously this is an SAP conference so I would expect the emphasis to be on the overall company, but I will continue to try to see if I can find something new and/or interesting to report. 😎

And if anyone is interested, I did not make it to any roller coasters yesterday.

I was invited to go to SAPPHIRE in Orlando this month, and I don’t even have to prepare a presentation. I’m happy. 😀 I am going to get to visit with some of the other SAP Mentors while I am there. I will also be able to have some meetings with some of my fellow GBN Steering Committee members. Oh, and I hope to catch up on some news and see what SAP has in mind for their marketing base.

It should be a busy trip. I may even hit a roller coaster (or two) at Universal Studios if I get the chance. 😉

The deadline for submitting an abstract for the 2009 GBN conference has recently been extended. The deadline was supposed to be today but is now April 24. That’s good news for me, as I have not been able to get my thoughts together yet about what to submit.

If you have never submitted an abstract before, the process is quite painless. All you have to do is come up with an idea and summarize it in several hundred words. That’s it. 🙂 Once you have that there is a simple web form to fill out and your submission goes into the process. This year for the first time the user community will be involved in the selection process (part of the value of being a member of GBN) and I thoroughly support that concept. In the past Business Objects would manage the selection process with little or no direct input from users.

One of two things will happen. Either you get selected at which point you have to create the presentation and deliver it to an audience of your peers and you get a free pass to the conference. Or you don’t get selected and don’t have to do the extra work. 😉

A few weeks ago I got a very interesting email. Without going into too many details (since nothing is finalized yet) it seems that I might have an opportunity to go to a Business Objects conference in Australia next year! The conference dates are May 25-26 and it takes place in Sydney. I’ve never been there but certainly would like to have the chance to go.

I will keep posting updates as I get more information. It would be great to meet some of the Australian BOB members.

Related Links

• Mastering Business Objects Conference, Sydney, Australia, May 25-26