Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I’ve had a number of folks ask me over the years what it takes to be a blogger. I’m going to start with Who, What, Where, When, and Why, the five “W” questions. I will answer them in the context of being a blogger, and in doing so I hope to give you some items to consider related to opening a blog of your own. That’s the answer to the “who” question already, it’s you. 🙂 With the “who” question answered, I will move on to the “what” question next.

What do I blog about?

The first and most obvious requirement is that you should have something that you want to talk about. Notice that I didn’t say you needed to have something that other folks want to hear. 😉 That’s really all there is to it. Pick a subject that you like and start researching and writing about it.

That being said, here is my first bit of advice: make your blog specific to a single topic. You might be interested in Beanie Babies, Indy car racing, European black metal bands, and vegetarianism. It’s going to be very unlikely that you will find a large audience that has all of those same interests! If you try to maintain one blog that crosses all four subjects, the odds are that a visitor is only going to be interested in about 25% of what you have to say. It is for that reason I have five different blogs, each on a different subject that I’m interested in. Some of them get more attention than others, and that’s okay. I talk more about posting frequency below. Continue reading “What Does It Take To Become A Blogger?”

In a recent tweet I shared a short story (it’s on twitter, it has to be short!) about something I witnessed earlier today. I was in our break-room getting ready to eat lunch. I was waiting in line for my turn at the microwave when a person walked into the room, grabbed a cup, and filled it with ice from the ice-maker. That’s not so unusual. What caught my interest was what they did after that. They went to the coffer maker where there is a hot water spigot (for making soups or hot chocolate) and proceeded to cover the ice with super-heated water.

I was first amused as I thought to myself, “What’s the point?”

Immediately upon asking myself that question, I was reminded of a number of different BI solutions that I have been asked to deliver over the years. So many times I have been asked to provide a [report|database|reporting system|universe] that “includes everything” so that the business user can pick out what they’re interested in. Large reports or universes seldom reach critical penetration in the business simply because they try to do too much. If you want ice, get some ice. If you want hot water, get some hot water. But when you try to do both at the same time, you get neither. The result is simply a lukewarm puddle.

Network access has been sporadic at times so I’m going to post a few random observations from the morning sessions…

They showed BI content on lots of different mobile devices, including the Blackberry Torch, the Blackberry pad, and the Samsung Galaxy. Not much depth shown but we saw live content on all three. The most interesting mobile surprise to me was showing Web Intelligence on the iPad including gesture support.

One comment that I have heard more than once but without a lot of demonstration support is the “suite” concept. They have reviewed and redone the interface on Crystal and Web Intelligence so they look more like tools froomthe same vendor. Think of the Microsoft Office toolbar concept.

Ramp up continues, with rumors of GA by May. Just in time for the annual conference. 🙂

They’re showing Webi on an iPad! Native reports distributed and interactive on the pad.

They also had a “save the tie” contest run via twitter, which will help some of the recent tweets make more sense.

SAP seems to be more interested in the “little guy” this year. Yesterday we got confirmation that EDGE 4.0 release is coming. Today we heard that they are licensing their pre-built analytic apps for the same customers. They’re even setting up their HANA systems in an “extra small” configuration so that technology can start to trickle down.

One comment that surprised me this morning was related to the analytic apps. The SAP guy said that they were surprised to find out that customers were already customizing their apps rather than using them out of the box. Of course they’re going to customize them! Everybody thinks their business is unique. What competitive advantage are they going to get from using the same system as everybody else?

I was able to crash a session for bloggers this afternoon (actually I was invited, but it sounds more fun to say I crashed the party). We had two hours to talk about everything coming in 4.0.

It wasn’t nearly enough time.

One interesting tidbit that came out of the meeting: there are over one million person-hours of effort into the 4.0 release! That’s a bunch of hours. Normally SAP would try to do a major release on an 18 month schedule, or in that ballpark at any rate. The 4.0 release has been in the works for almost twice that long.

What does that mean? It means there is a lot to talk about. However, I’ll try to summarize a few bullets for now and save more for the main event tomorrow.

First, every aspect of the suite has been touched. That means from the data collection / integration / cleansing all the way through to presentation and reporting. Anyone that is interested (as I am) in the semantic layer would of course know about the new IDT or Information Design Tool. We spent only a few minutes on that too this afternoon, and it’s one of the major components that got updated in this release.

We talked a bit about HANA, and how it will eventually be used not only to support in-memory analytics, but in-memory anything.

We talked about event-driven BI. In fact tomorrow we’re going to hear a customer success story about how a major railroad company is looking to use this technology to take the next step beyond their current BI.

We heard that Netweaver is not going away, and we also heard that there will be an EDGE release of the 4.0 platform coming.

Someone mentioned to me that the 4.0 release seemed to be “primarily for SAP customers.” That came up today, and the response was that over 90% of the enhancements in the products would be immediately usable by anyone, no matter what their environment happened to be. I don’t have a list 🙂 but I don’t have a problem believing that statistic.

We saw more evidence that Web Intelligence (as well as the new semantic layer) now supports dimension data natively, rather than requiring any number of alternate solutions that have been used by various folks over the past few years.

We heard that there are around 30 customers participating in the 4.0 “ramp up” process, meaning they have 4.0 either deployed in production or are ready to do so. This came out after one of the bloggers asked how to respond to customers that say, “Skip 4.0, wait for 4.1.”

After our meeting we went to a reception. When that was done, several of us walked to Roxy’s Deli and had dessert. I had cheesecake. 😀 It’s New York City, I have to eat cheesecake, right? I first discovered this place (they’re right on Times Square) when I was working for a client several years ago. I have been working my way through their cheesecake varieties ever since! Tonight I had triple chocolate brownie cheesecake. It was good, but not in my top two favorites. The deli itself is quite expensive, so I generally only get dessert. It’s plenty.

Tomorrow is a full day. We’re told that there are over 500 people in attendance physically here at the hotel, and another 6,000 registered to attend virtually. I will try to do live blogs from the floor of the event, but I’m not yet sure how the connectivity will be set up. At the very least I will post more when I get home.

I’m heading off to New York City for the SAP Run Better Tour and BI4 launch. I expect the next two days to be exciting… And full. It started when my alarm clock went off at 4am this morning, which explains the title of this blog post. Right now it feels witty. When I wake up later, perhaps not so much. 🙂

I hope to do some live (or at least semi-live) blogging during the event. I will tweeting to some of the others at the event since we probably don’t need 50 people saying the same thing in small chunks.

Back in a few hours. After I get some sleep on the plane.

Live, from New York, it’s Dave! Yes, I have the opportunity to head to New York City for the SAP Run Better Tour event this week. I assume I’ll be able to live-blog from the event, so I’m making sure my iPad is fully charged before the trip. There are a few SAP Mentor items on the agenda that may be under NDA so if I disappear for an hour or two don’t worry, I’ll be back. 🙂 I’m looking forward to the trip.

Today I attended a Desktop to Web Intelligence Migration influence council hosted by ASUG. Clearly based on posts on BOB there is a lot of frustration and trauma being experienced by folks that are deeply invested in Desktop Intelligence. I do not anticipate being an active participant in this council myself, but I wanted to hear what SAP had to say. The first thing they mentioned was the final support dates for Desktop Intelligence, and they depend on your customer support agreement. If you are on standard (mainstream) maintenance then you can continue to get support through 2015. For those customers that pay for priority one support, you get an extra two years, all the way out to 2017.

The next item on the agenda was yet another listing of reasons from SAP as to why Desktop Intelligence will be discontinued. They claim 🙂 that there is a decreasing interest in the product, which I expect to be true but you would not know based on the very vocal responses on BOB to the contrary. Web Intelligence does currently cover the majority of the features, but there are some significant holes at this time. From a coding perspective, I am definitely going to miss the VBA capabilities, at least until I can get more comfortable with writing / implementing Java code.

As a part of the influence council, SAP is looking for help in understanding what customers need in order to make the conversion. Do we need more service offerings (consulting or products) to aid in that conversion? Are there specific features that are “must haves” in order to make the leap? What about the report conversion tool, are there additional options required there? One item that I have heard requested (and turned down) many times is the ability to open a .REP file directly in the rich client. From a user convenience perspective, it makes sense. From a coding / architecture perspective, it’s a terrible idea. The report conversion tool is a complex bit of code. It makes sense that it’s a standalone product. If they decide to include all of that logic within the rich client, then that’s an awful lot of extra baggage to carry around for a temporary use. And that extra code would also be present for any new customers that perhaps never even had any .REP reports to deal with. So despite the requests, I would be surprised if the rich client ever got the ability to directly open a .REP file.

But perhaps if the influence council decides it’s important enough, then the technical issues will be overruled and that feature will become part of the tool. The SAP representatives did confirm that the top two missing features are custom groups and free hand SQL. I’m not sure which is number one versus number two, but those requests do match my experience as far as conversations I have had with other users.

Bud Stewart from AT&T is the customer chair for this influence council. He had one slide where he talked briefly about the agenda in place, including the process of identifying key issues that current customers are finding as they go through the conversion.

I believe that further participation in the council is covered under a non-disclosure agreement, but I wanted to share the initial high-level topics that were mentioned on the kickoff call. It will be interesting to see the final resolution. And no, I don’t expect SAP to bring back Desktop Intelligence. 🙂

There are several bits of ASUG news that I wanted to share, in case folks have missed them. First and foremost is the launch of the web site of the same name as this blog post: www.asugnews.com. The site is billed as an online magazine, but it’s not just content by members for members, they’ve hired a couple of recognized industry personages to write for the new site. The two dedicated writers are Thomas Wailgum and Courtney Bjorlin, and their biographies are summed up in Bridgette’s introductory post.

Thomas, formerly of CIO.com, brings more than 15 years of experience covering technology to ASUG. Courtney, formerly of SearchSAP.com, brings nearly a decade of reporting experience. They are award-winning reporters who understand the SAP ecosystem, and I am thrilled to have them leading ASUGnews.com.

I think this is an essential step forward for ASUG, in that it isn’t just a content aggregation of news and information that can be found elsewhere, but a portal for sharing new and unique content from dedicated resources.

My friend and fellow SAP Mentor Miko Yuk has helped launch the site with a blog post that I can certainly related to, titled, “SAP BusinessObjects in 2011: Top three questions from customers”

ASUG is also celebrating their 20th anniversary this year. Bridgette promises lots of interesting items to come. (Will there be cake?)

Finally, the annual (Spring) conference is just around the corner. My friend and co-worker (and Reportapalooza victor!) Brian Durning will be presenting. Check him (and many others) out if you attend, more details at www.sapandasug.com.