David Taylors' Business Intelligence Blog

ASUG is offering a complimentary membership for North American customers and partners of the SAP BusinessObjects solution portfolio who operate in a non-ERP data environment. Whether you used to be a member of Global BusinessObjects Network (GBN) or not, you can now apply for membership.

At first, I didn’t like the idea of SAP charging customer for a user group, but now that I’ve been able to explore all the vast resources available on the website and see how easy it is to connect with other SIGs and people in an industry, I see it as a truly invaluable resource.   There are regular webinars on every conceivable topic and all webinars are archived in case you miss them.

Complimentary ASUG Membership Process

Take immediate advantage of your complimentary ASUG membership:

• Click here to get the application started
  
• Search for your company and complete an individual login application. If you do not see your company name just complete a corporate application for your organization to receive the complimentary  membership here.
• If you are an SAP BusinessObjects partner, you will need to contact ASUG here and they will assist you through the application process.

Are You An Influencer?

View this special video invitation from ASUG CEO, Bridgette Chambers, to the inaugural ASUG Influencer Summit for SAP BusinessObjects customers. Nominate yourself or another Influencer in the community and join us to help shape the future direction of the communities that support SAP BusinessObjects customers. Nominations will be accepted through September 15, 2010. The Summit will be held on Monday, Oct. 4 from 1-6 p.m. at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, the day before the SAP BusinessObjects User Conference starts.

ASUG Members Get User Conference Discount

After you join ASUG, you can also get additional discounts on the SAP BusinessObjects User Conference.   View the agenda here.  It’s full on BusinessObjects from start to finish.

«Good BI»

In the wake of the gulf crisis, I thought it would be a good idea to show you some of the ways companies like SAP are taking sustainability seriously.  If you’ve not had a chance yet, check out the 2009 Sustainability Report on the SAP website.  Here is a quick look at the performance scorecard across the Environmental, Social and Economic indicators.

Today there are no standards for reporting sustainability as there are in areas like financial performance, but I think that SAP’s website represents a standout example of how to communicate this information.

What’s To Like

There are a number of key items that I like about the website.

• Interactivity – the report allows readers to interact with its performance data through embedded analytics
• Discussion – it allows open discussion of SAP’s sustainability efforts and strategies via integration with Twitter and Facebook.

The report also features the latest Sustainability Map which helps stakeholders understand how SAP solutions help line-of-business managers deliver on the business case for sustainability. In short, it’s designed to enhance our leadership in sustainability and to collect feedback, ideas and criticism from stakeholders in an open manner.

Pretty cool, eh?

If you’d rather have a guided tour of the solution, there is a 5 minute video you can watch at:
http://sapsustainabilityreport.com/tour.php

Are You thinking about Sustainability?

Sustainability should be an important topic for everyone, but especially to executives.  More than ever, shareholders are demanding that organizations in every sector have a sustainability strategy.  Here are some of the top issues executives want to know how to:

1. Introduce safe and eco-friendly products and avoid non-compliance to protect my revenue and brand?
2. Develop product compliant with safety and environmental regulations without increasing cost or time to market?
3. Ensure manufacturing and distribution meets product safety, compliance and traceability requirements?
4. Report compliance throughout the full lifecycle of our products, including end-of-life?

These are all important questions that SAP can help answer.  Consider sustainability among your top 2011 initiatives… who knows what’s going to happen to energy prices and government regulations and oversight given the disaster by BP and Transocean in the Gulf.

BTW, if you haven’t seen the amazing 60 Minutes expose on the disaster, you might want to check it out:
Part 1: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6490348n
Part 2: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6490378n

«Good BI»

SAP BusinessObjects delivers great Business Intelligence solutions so that organizations can report off their existing data sources.  But what is the point of reporting of data that isn’t accurate anyway?  Although it is true that accurate data is pretty useless if you can get access to it, the converse is also true.  What is the point of a great end-user enabled system that includes inaccurate data?

My Top 5 Customers – Really?

Take a look at the report below.  (If you want to download this Xcelsius Model it is available below.)

Who are my top 5 customers?

Top 10 Customers

Did you say:  General Electric, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Home Depot and Walmart?

Well, Sorry.  I’m afraid, that would be incorrect.

You see, what often happens in real-world situations is that organizations think they have more customers than they actually do.  That’s because within their CRM system, employees are able to add the same customer multiple times with multiple spellings.  This has happened in our case as well.  Let’s apply BusinessObjects Data Quality to this real-world situation.  With SAP BusinessObjects, you can take company names, customer names, addresses, etc. and standardize them, e.g. UPS = United Parcel Service = UPS Inc., WalMart = Wal*Mart = Wal-Mart, First Commerce Bank = 1st Commerce Bank.

My Top 5 Customers – Really!

Let’s have a look at this same report with Data Quality applied:

Top 10 Customers with Data Quality

Do you see the changes?

Walmart has jumped up into second place and United Parcel Service is now in fifth place.  We can also see the our profitability at Walmart is higher than we thought (26.8% instead of 18.7%) and United Parcel Service is actually lower that we thought (28.6% instead of 26.3%).  When you are making business decisions off your corporate data, it’s imperative that it is accurate and complete.

Here is the source data behind this chart and you can see how the lack of standardization has led to the incorrect results.  I have highlighted the offending records for you:

Raw Customer Data Behind the Top 10 Customers Report

Once we apply data quality and standardize the names, the order changes and I have a new top 5!  Often times our biggest customers, vendors, partners and products don’t get the credit they deserve for contributing to our success.  Once you’ve got data quality, you can know that you know that you know, the true numbers.

I’ve introduced this topic under the name of Data Quality, but Data Quality really falls under the broader topic of Data Stewardship or Data Governance.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

The bottom line around data quality is that you don’t know what you don’t know.  If you manage a data warehouse which accepts feeds from dozens of systems, then it’s highly likely that you have a data quality problem and don’t even know it.  It’s a critical aspect of data warehousing.  Operational systems are notorious for bad data.  Last year, I read an excellent, practical guide to data quality called, Data Quality Assessment.  The book itself does not endorse a specific software vendor but all the principles found in the book would apply to any organization looking to improve their corporate data quality.

Downloads – See It Live

If you’d like to see an Xcelsius model of this chart live, I’ve made it available for download.  The source code for the .xlf is also available:
http://trustedbi.com/files/Importance of Data Quality.zip

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

Sometimes in life you run across situations that are hard to believe.  Here is an example where truth is stranger than fiction.  When you want to get someone’s attention when it comes to data quality, just tell them this example.  This data quality situation really happened and the results were disastrous.  This video is from Timo Elliott. When you click on it, it will take you to his website:

Timo's Data Quality Presentation (2min)

Do you have any good stories to share?  I’d love to hear them.

«Good BI»

Looking Forward to 2010

Over and over again I get questions from customers wondering what the future for the BusinessObjects product suite holds now that it has been acquired by software giant SAP.  Much of what we have heard over the last twelve months has been about product roadmaps and integration centered clearly around SAP Customers.  But what about those of us who aren’t SAP customers?  What should we do?

The Future of SAP BusinessObjects

SAP has the challenge of providing deeper, native integration with the SAP BusinessObjects tool set to meet the needs of their ERP Customers.  This cannot however be done at the exclusion of the rest of classic BusinessObjects large ecosystem which includes significant numbers of OEM partners and integrators who need the type of openness that has made BusinessObjects a trusted platform for Business Intelligence.  I don’t have a crystal ball, but based on what I have seen, SAP understands that there is a large customer base of BusinessObjects customers who neither currently have or will ever have classic SAP as part of their environments.

The preliminary indications are positive.  The buzz from the GBN conference in October was positive.  SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 introduced more features for non-SAP platforms that for SAP platforms.  SAP BusinessObjects continues to enhance WebIntelligence providing all but a few of the remaining features from DesktopIntelligence.  SAP BusinessObjects Explorer will allow for accelerated non-SAP data in early 2010.  I believe this will continue to be the case for the next major release of SAP BusinessObjects due out next year.  Time will tell.

Feeling Not So Special

I like many customers have been disappointed with the consolidation of SAP’s ASUG and BusinessObjects’s GBN.  During the recent GABOUG meeting, I was invited to visit Atlanta’s ASUG user group meeting in January.  I glanced at the current agenda and had to smile.  Of the 15+ topics that would discussed during the all day event, only one topic sounded BI related, Emerging Urgencies within SAP’s Business User Solutions.  I hope the lack of non-SAP related content is only a part of the initial growing pains and not an indication of things to come.

To ASUG’s credit, they have since added one additional BI session in the afternoon lead by Gabriel Orthous from McKesson.

Need to Feel Good about BusinessObjects?

I learned something more about SAP BusinessObjects from this video… the end might catch you by surprise.  [UPDATE: Oh Man!  No sense of humor?  It would appear that for reasons of either "inappropriateness" or "excessive political correctness", depending on your point of view, somebody at SAP told YouTube to pull the video...  Shame.  It was really funny]

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Have you ever been confused by directions or road signs?  Sometimes information doesn’t bring clarity.  Hopefully this blog will bring some clarify to potential issues you might encounter in your upgrade to SP2.  I can’t believe this is my 4th post about the subject.

Issues When Moving From Fix Pack 1.6+ to SP2

I made the move to SP2 several weeks ago from XI 3.1 FP 1.3, but what I have since discovered is that not everyone’s journey has been so straight forward.  If a BusinessObjects system was using XI 3.1 FP 1.6 or later, then you may run into issues after you upgrade to SP2.

It seems that at the time SP2 was being built, all the fixes up to FP 1.5 were included; however there have been a number of additional FixPack releases SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 since then.  SAP has released Fix Pack 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8.  These three releases included DLLs that were newer than the DLLs in the SP2 release because they contained fixes that were not originally in SP2.  If this is the case for you will want to move to Fix Pack 2.1 immediately.

What happened?

What I’ve discovered is that due to the desire to keep the size of Service Packs as small as possible, the service pack does not overwrite all the DLLs on the system.  Instead, the service packs looks at your system and only replaces those DLLs which are older than the DLLs within your BusinessObjects XI 3.1 environment.  This means that if you upgraded to FP 1.6, 1.7 or 1.8, some DLLs will be newer than the DLLs contained within SP2.  This can introduce incompatibilities.

For example, if you use WebIntelligence, you may notice that after sometime the WebIntelligence Server stops functioning and you get the following message when opening a WebIntelligence document:

Cannot Initialize Report Engine server: (Error: RWI 00226) (Error:INF)

The Good News

The Good News is that engineering has already identified this issue and has fixed it through the release of Fix Pack 2.1.  If you read the release notes of Fix Pack 2.1, you will see the following:

BusinessObjects XI 3.1 and Crystal Reports 2008 Service Pack 2 Fixed Issues
This Service Pack can only be applied on top of BusinessObjects
Enterprise XI 3.1 / Crystal Reports 2008 SP1. This Service Pack
includes all XI 3.1 FixPacks up to 1.5. Note If you install XI 3.1
SP2 in top of FixPack 1.6 or later, reinstall the latest 2.x FixPack.
Each machine in your deployment must be updated separately with
the patches you require. A separate patch is available for each
BusinessObjects product that has a standalone installation.

There it is.  Tucked into the release notes of Fix Pack 2.1 it explains that if you are on a later fix pack, you need to install Fix Pack 2.1.  I would welcome your suggestions to pass on to the BusinessObjects engineering team of ways to avoid this in the future.

«Good BI»

SAP BusinessObjects Wants Your Input!

The SAP BusinessObjects Product team is looking for your input!  In less than two months, SAP BusinessObjects Users from around the world will be decending on Dallas Texas for the annual SAP BusinessObjects User Conference.  This year, the SAP BusinessObjects is introducing the concept of a product council, where you can provide feedback into the product.  You will get a chance to see how other companies are leveraging SAP BusinessObjects products.  Now is your opportunity to tell them what you love and what you hate…  knowing that feedback will make it’s way back to the product team.

This is a Start

Personally I think this is a great start, but I wish that SAP would send all the product managers and program managers to the conference so that they can speak face-to-face with customers.  Back in the 90′s when I was working with Lotus products, they had a huge annual conference in Orlando and their entire product development team was onsite and had lots of informal one-on-one time with customers.  As an end-user, I loved that.  Even if they weren’t able to address my problems at least I felt I had been heard.

Influence Sessions

SAP is taking a slightly different tact.  They are creating a “council” that will work to gather all the feedback that SAP BusinessObjects users give.  They will consolidate and prioritize the issues and work with the SAP BusinessObjects Product Development team to improve future product releases.  The Influence sessions will include:

Business Objects Enterprise Council – to discuss administration, security, platform features and versioning/change management within the Business Objects Enterprise solution.

Xcelsius Council – to discuss  issues surrounding the new integration with Excel, document areas for improvement, identify issues that are occurring with the system.

WebI Council -was formed last year and will be presenting an update of their work and where their recommendations fit into future SAP BusinessObjects product releases. A portion of the presentation will also include a discussion of migration from Deski to WebI.

Designer Council -  with no major changes in Designer since 1999 (yep, that’s 10 years!), the semanic layer is an area of upcoming innovation and redesign.  Make sure your voice is heard!

Data Management Council – will provide customers with the means for constructive dialog with SAP BusinessObjects regarding their use and implementation of the Data Services product. The Influence Council will provide SAP BusinessObjects with feedback from its users about proposed changes, integrations, or new features in future Data Services releases.

So Let Your Voice Be Heard

Plato said:  Necessity is the mother of invention.  I can tell you through my many years of experience that the best product features and innovations come from solving real-world customer problems. Therefore I strongly encourage you to attend the 2009 SAP BusinessObjects user conference and take full advantage of these Influence Council sessions.  You may be the reason behind the next major innovation at SAP BusinessObjects!

Click here for more information…

«Good BI»

Memorial Day was a great day to reflect on the sacrifices of so many for the freedoms and liberties will all enjoy. Thank you veterans!!

After attending a local Memorial Day Rememberance and Celebration, I spent some time cleaning my office and I came across an excellent article which I wanted to pass along.  So often when I talk to organizations about Business Intelligence, I ask them about their business requirements so that I can understand their current business pain.  All to often what follows is feature function laundry list of capabilities they are sure they can’t live without.  Time after time, the BI requirements given to software vendors are not tied to a specific business problem. This is a recipe for disaster.

The following article is an article from DM Review entitled, Business Requirements for BI and the BI Portfolio: How to Get it Right:
http://www.b-eye-network.com/print/6887

This article does a great job at pointing out the weaknesses of generic BI requirements and why functional requirements are not enough.  If you have BI requirements and are evaluating BI tools, I highly recommend you take a few minutes to read this article.

«Good BI»

Business Intelligence – Now More Than Ever!

I was at Sapphire 2009 last week and enjoyed getting a chance to talk with customers about their priorities in the new economic climate.  Everyone is hoping that things will turn around soon but in the meantime, there was a lot of interest around Business Intelligence and the best way to get all the information necessary to make the best business decisions.  Each day organizations are being forced to make hard choices and those choices need to be based on ALL the available  information available – not just hunches and best guesses.  More organizations have the information they need but they haven’t fully plugged into the power of Business Intelligence.

Market research shows two important two facts (previous reported by BusinessWeek):
• 43% of users say they’re not sure if internal information is accurate information
• 77% said bad decisions had been made because of lack of information

Now it the wrong time to make decisions on based gut feel, with inadequate information. Companies are looking to Business Intelligence tools to not only show them how to cut costs, but also how to model data for the future.  Regardless of what Business Intelligence platform you use, now is the time to leverage it to the fullest.

Here is a great follow-up article from BusinessWeek:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc2009032_101762.htm

«Good BI»

I haven’t seen a lot of information available that talks about what’s new in the release of the latest version, BusinessObjects XI 3.1, so I thought I would point out some of the highlights I’ve come across.  You may also want read the complete What’s New in BusinessObjects XI 3.1 guide from the website.

Release Highlights

BusinessObjects XI 3.1 is a release that is focused on bringing parity to our platform support for both Java and .NET.  In BusinessObjects XI 3.0 we did not provide a .NET version of our standard BI portal, InfoView.  In BusinessObjects XI 3.1 we have released a native .NET portal which has near parity with the Java version.  I say near parity, because there are a few things missing, namely:

• Encyclopedia
• Dashboard Builder
• Voyager
• BI Mobile
• Polestar

For companies who find comfort in an all Microsoft World, this release will be welcomed.  BusinessObjects XI 3.1 has added support for Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Sharepoint Portal Server 2007.  (There is also Microsoft Active Directory Forest Support as well!)  If you are using the SAP Integration Kit, this is also now available on the .NET platform.

Web Application Container Service

One of the way in which BusinessObjects has been able to balance both rich feature sets and cross platform compatibility is through the introduction of a new server to the BusinessObjects Platform.  This service is called the WACS, Web Application Container Service, and is a java container.  What this allows BusinessObjects to do is to run existing java applications through the BusinessObjects framework.

Let me explain how this will work in practice.  The BusinessObjects Administration Console, the CMC, is written in Java.  Instead of rewritting this application in .NET, BusinessObjects simply added the WACS to the BusinessObjects service bus and will execute application via this service.  The beauty of this solution is that the .NET administrator never has to worry about it.  BusinessObjects manages everything.

What other Applications can use the WACS?

Besides the CMC, there are a number of other applications that could within the WACS.  This includes:

• Interactive DHTML Viewer for WebIntelligence
• Query as a Web Service (for supporting Xcelsius)
• LiveOffice

There is an important document that covers what is supported and what is not supported within the WACS framework.  In theory all native java-based aspects of the BusinessObjects application suite could be run through the WACS but the question is whether or not it is officially supported.  This document is called:  Web Application Container Server (WACS): Supported and Unsupported Features for BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1and it explains the details.  You can download it here.

Additional Platform Enhancements

BusinessObjects XI 3.1 supports IPv6 100% across the product suite (except for Desktop Intelligence).  They have also added their first native 64-bit architecture.  Since BusinessObjects XIr2 SP3, the platform has been able to run on 64-bit operating systems however the platform still runs as a 32-bit application.  The first native 64-bit release is an the HP-UX IA-64 Itanium hardware.

Life Cycle Manager

Life Cycle Manager, LCM for short, s a web-based utility that allows the administrator to:

• Promote BI content from one system to another (without affecting the dependencies of the content)
• Manage dependencies of BI content
• Manage different versions of BI content
• Roll back (yahoo!) promoted BI content

This tool does not install with the platform, but is a separate install.

“So isn’t that what the Import Wizard is for?”, you may be asking?  Well, certainly the import wizard has been used to provide this type of functionality in the past – especially with the introduction of BIAR files in BusinessObjects XI; however I think you’ll see from the list of features in LCM, it is better to have a specialized tool for the LCM process.

Life Cycle Manager provides a number of features over the Import Wizard (besides rollback) including:

• Granular control over the objects selected (yes, we trust you)
• Scheduling Promotions Jobs (a job is a collection of BI content or InfoObjects to be precise)
• Integrated Version Control (via Subversion)
• Database connection overrides and mapping (Tired of changing database connection strings?)
• Auditing
• The ability to “preview” to changes before committing them
• Rollback, Did I mention rollback?

There is a new LCM Job server which has been added to the platform to manage the promotion process.

Have you ever created a BIAR file and realized you missed a file?  Now with LCM you can save your Promotion job and use it to generate a BIAR file.  If you find that something is missing, you can simply open up the promotion job , select the missing objects and regenerate the BIAR file.

BIAR ≠ BIAR

When is a BIAR file not a BIAR file?  Well, with the LCM tool, the BIAR files which are generated by the LCM tool are LCMBIAR files.  As the name indicates, the LCMBIAR files are NOT compatible with the BIAR files used with the Import Wizard.  Bummer.

Voyager

Voyager was the other biggie.  A lot of work was put into providing interface enhancements and increased performance.  This is probably the last release before the eagerly anticipated release of “Pioneer” in 2009, which will combine Voyager’s intuitive user interface with the powerful OLAP capabilities of the BEx OLAP tools.

Voyager now has a number of new visualizations including Box-Plot, Scatter, Bubble and Radar charts.    There are also a number of features that were in OLAP Intelligence, which were missing in earlier versions of Voyager, namely, Exception highlighting, URL Linking to other BI Content and Favorite Groups.

Have you ever made a mistake when building a Voyager workspace?  Well, now you have full undo/redo capabilities.  After being so used to the undo/redo capabilities in WebIntelligence, I always found the missing feature extremely annoying and I’m sure other did to.

Fly Over Of Additional Features

Rather than talk about additional features in detail, I thought I would briefly mention some of them here and perhaps in the future I can blog about them in detail if there is interest.

Semantic Layer -Support for BEGIN_SQL, Prompt support for codes AND descriptions.

Crystal Reports – Dual Monitor support, flash printing to PDF.

WebIntelligence -Support for Extension Points, Auto-Save, RelativeValue(), Multi-Pass Bursting

SAP Integration – SNC for BusinessObjects Universes (Prior to XI 3.1, this was only available for Crystal Reports), Improve Prompt Support for Hierarchy and Hierarchy Node dependencies.

Dashboard Builder – Printing, Interportlet Communication

Summary

There are some good things that have come out in this latest release.  This release is also the latest ‘reset point’ for BusinessObjects XI 3.X maintenance, so you can expect fix packs for XI 3.0 to no longer be released.

Hope you found this information useful.  I’ve tried to keep it short and sweet.

«Good BI»

Remember the Mouse revolution? I’ll never forget the first time I saw a Macintosh and used the mouse to move a pointer across the screen. I could start programs, paint pictures and do all kinds of cool things without learning a new interface.

Well, Jeff Han recently introduced the world to an entirely new generation of user interface during the annual TED conference. It is a Minority Report moment.

Its a new multi-sensor touchscreen which allows the user interface to completely disappear. You have to see it to believe it. It is truly incredible.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html