Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Most of my friends know that I’m their friend in real life, not on Facebook. 🙂 I’ve never joined that service, initially through lack of interest and later on through genuine concerns over their privacy issues and how much data people are seemingly willing to give up for a web site with, frankly, fairly minimal appeal, at least to me. I have also wondered in the past why corporations are so quick to give up control over their own content (replacing www.product_name.com with www.facebook.com/product_name). MicroStrategy offers a social media plugin that can pull in Facebook data, and of course SAP offers various methods to acquire and process unstructured data via their text analytics options in their Data Services products.

But this morning I read an article from Time.com suggesting that we might be looking at the beginning of the end for Facebook. I am not going to summarize the article here, but I would like to run an informal poll.

If you are a member of Facebook, are you using it:

• More now than you did last year?
• Less now than you did last year?
• About the same as what you did last year?

Please use the comment form below to enter your response.

I was checking the weather this morning and noticed that weather.com now offers a social media component to their web site. It seems that if I am so inclined, I can see what other folks in my area are saying about the weather. Without doing much, well, any research I am guessing that they’re simply looking at the location information that can optionally be provided on tweets and then scanning for certain weather-related keywords.

Here’s a screen shot of the fail I noticed. Have a look at some of the tweets.

How many of them are about the weather versus something else?

First I see a person from Garland (not far away from me) who is tweeting what appears to be various national headlines, including one about the real estate situation in Florida. Apparently there are “clouds on the horizon.” Does that have anything to do with weather in my area? 😆 No, but it does have a key word “clouds” included.

I like the next example even more. We certainly have clouds here in Texas, but I can’t remember the last time we had a blizzard. Yet someone from Lewisville, Texas, just a few miles up the road from me, is tweeting his disappointment about being left out of (again I’m assuming) a beta program for the game company Blizzard Entertainment and their next incarnation of the Diablo game series. Yes, there is a weather-related keyword in that tweet, but would it not make sense to tie key words to geographical areas? The odds of having a blizzard in Texas (the weather kind, at least) are slim.

This is part of what makes text analytics so difficult. Business Objects purchased a company several years ago (Inxight) that delivers text analytics; this product is now a part of the Data Services product line. It would be interesting to see if they have a feature that would allow me to tie geo-location services to keywords so that I could discount tweets mentioning blizzards in Texas, or hurricanes in Alaska.

Ultimately it comes down to context. When I read those tweets, I can immediately see that they’re not really talking about the weather, even if they do have weather-related keywords. Apparently it’s still challenging for software to do the same thing. Then again, it’s hard enough to predict the weather correctly, so maybe I can forgive them a few errant tweets. 😉

Over on BOB we’re having some fun with a few holiday logos in place of our standard green guy. Our regular board logo looks like this:

For the next few weeks, board members will see the logo rotate between alternate versions such as these:

And of course this:

During the American Thanksgiving week we used this:

Now I do realize that some of these logos are not necessarily going to reflect the global nature of our community. For example, the snowflake probably doesn’t make much sense to our friends below the equator. 😉 So that’s where this post comes in to play.

If you have a minimal amount of graphical talent (or even a lot!) and would like to have your work immortalized as a part of our community, here is your chance! Come up with a seasonal logo – it does not have to be for the end of year holiday season, it can be anything you like. For example, how about a special logo for talk like a pirate day?

Come up with a logo, and as long as it meets certain standards of taste (I don’t think I need to list the obvious issues here) we’ll consider adding your seasonal logo to the rotation next year. Until Google opens their next competition to design a Google Doodle, this could be your shot at Internet fame. Go for it. 😎

How do you submit an idea? Check out this topic on BOB for more details.

Related Links

• What is a Google Doodle?

A few months ago I had the pleasure to talk to Courtney Bjorlin of ASUGNews.com about a Twitter exchange taking place between several folks. They were discussing the need for (and likelihood of) finding Business Objects experts (whether employees or consultants) that already have SAP skills. The main points of the discussion revolved around the concept of whether there was a current market for SAP + Business Objects skills, and secondarily whether there was even a supply of folks with the required expertise if so. I’m not in the consulting arena anymore, but I’ve seen how things have progressed over the past decade and definitely had some thoughts that I shared with Courtney. She wrote a post for ASUG News (included in the related links at the end of this post) and we also revisited the talk at the conference last month in Orlando (YouTube link also below).

I thought I would go into more depth here since I’m not bound by editorial constraints as far as post length. 😉

My personal experience is certainly weighted on the legacy Business Objects side. I’ve been working with the products since 1995 and have seen quite a progression during the last sixteen years. Keep that in mind as you read this post as I am sure it gives me a certain bias. The question of the day: Is there is an adequate supply of Business Objects experts with SAP expertise? Does that question even make sense? Continue reading “SAP + Business Objects Skills – Do They Exist?”

In Part I of this post I talked a little bit about what I think it takes to get started in the world of blogging. In this post I would like to talk more about some of the challenges related to running your own blog. To that end I would like to answer a few questions that people have asked me, and perhaps one or two that people have not asked but maybe should have. Continue reading “Blogging For Dollars? Or Something Else?”

There have been a couple of issues discovered with my universe compare tool. One has been fixed in the code, and the other appears to be a universe issue which I have not been able to decide how to approach. An update to version 2.0.1 has been posted, so please download this updated version if you have been experiencing issues.

Context Issue

The first issue was rather generic. The message was Automation error: The server threw an exception. It seemed to happen while the code was looping through a collection of joins or contexts for some universes, although it had never happened to me during my usage. (Of course, isn’t that always the case?) One user was able to send me a copy of their universe for my testing and I was able to recreate the error which is always the first step towards a resolution. Continue reading “Dagira Change Log Utility 2.0.1 Released”

Steve, Michael, Amy, Susan and I got together with Eric Vallo and several other folks at the conference last week to talk about the origin of BOB. Amy and Susan were the co-moderators of the mailing list that became what we know as BOB today. Steve and Michael are current BOB moderators and were part of the initial discussions when we discussed options for transitioning into something beyond the list. The five of us had a great time reminiscing about how BOB came about.

Have a listen!

I did not do much blogging at the conference this year, primarily because I was always doing something! I had two presentations on Monday, followed by an interview session with ASUG News on Tuesday morning, followed by my participation in the Leadership 2.0 session Tuesday afternoon, the BI 4.0 launch celebration Tuesday night, a usability study for an interesting new potential product this morning, and my flight home. 😯 Over the next few days I will attempt to turn my notes taking at the various sessions into blog posts, as well as upload my two sessions for download both here and on the conference web site.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you that took the time to come up to me at the conference and say how much you appreciated either BOB or my blog. As long as I have been doing this sort of stuff (on BOB we will be celebrating our 10-year anniversary next year) hearing from people never ever gets old. Thank you for taking the time to let me know that you have been helped in some fashion.

I gave away one of the last remaining BOB hats at my session yesterday. Just another reason to try to come to the SAP Business Objects conference next year.

They added an additional day next year to focus on analytics. Still getting information on what that means as far as extra cost and what content will look like.

Are you attending the SAP Business Objects user conference in Orlando next week? If so, look for an email soon inviting you to a special lunchtime panel discussion on social media, influence, and leadership called “Leadership 2.0” and featuring folks such as Cindi Howson, Lisa Leslie, Timo Elliott, and … somehow… me. 🙂 Reservations will be required as space is limited to the first 100 people to sign up. I think they’re planning on sending out an email to all folks registered for the conference, but you can get a jump on reserving your spot by going to the reservation page.

The panel will run from 12:30 to 2:30pm on Tuesday, October 11^th and will include a lunch. The Twitter hash tag for the event will be #L2dot0.

Added Information
If you’re not attending the conference, you can still participate. There is a dial-in number where you can listen, and you can post questions via the hashtag mentioned above. Here’s the call information:

Participant Access Instructions – Dial in 5-10 minutes prior to start time using the Participant Phone Number and Participant Passcode.
Participant Passcode: 690937

Toll-Free Phone Number (United States/Canada): 877-702-9054
Toll Phone Number (International): 913-312-1229