Paul Blogs on BI Archive

Zoned Out in Zurich

By
Paul
Published: September 25, 2011Posted in: Europe Trip 2011, Paul Blogs on BITags:
Zoned Out in Zurich

After a 10 hour transatlantic flight followed by just 3 hours of sleep, I find myself walking to Victoria Station in London at 4:45 am local time to catch the 5 am train to the airport to fly to Zurich, Switzerland. I was not so much walking as sleep walking and when I arrived at the platform only to be told the train is delayed because the driver has not arrived, my only thought was one of envy as I visualized that happy train driver all snuggled up in a cozy bed.

I am attending an SAP BusinessObjects Add On conference showcasing the latest and greatest third party add-on solutions for BusinessObjects and I am here to present InfoBurst which has become increasingly popular in Europe where now over 50 customers use it for BI report and Xcelsius dashboard scheduling, bursting and publishing.

The event is held at a unique resort on top of the highest peak in Zurich with spectacular views of both the city and the snow capped Alps in the distance.

The resort itself is quite eclectic in décor with a maze of rooms on many levels. My presentation is scheduled to take place in a room called the Cave, appropriately named as it was situated in the basement.

I head off in search of the Cave about 30 minutes before my presentation and wind my way through a series of dimly lit corridors and find a room with a low ceiling full of tables and chairs with a sign outside identifying it as the Cave. It looks more like a wine bar and is actually decorated with bottles of wine but at one end is a large flat screen TV with a monitor connection hanging from it so I assume this must be the place. I whip out my laptop and get busy setting up for my presentation which involves moving tables due to the short monitor cable and adjusting the projected screen size to fit the monitor properly.
While I am busy beavering away, I am interrupted by a group of hotel staff who walk in carrying their lunches. In their broken English they explain that this is their lunch room but I confidently tell them that I am presenting here and they kindly agree to move to another room.

About 5 minutes before the start of the presentation, nobody has arrived and I start to think that maybe I am in the wrong place. I wander back through the corridors and go through a door that opens to an outside loading ramp. I see a conference sign pointing to a room called the cave in the opposite direction. I follow the sign and walk into a room full of people eagerly waiting for me to start my presentation!

Apart from feeling very stupid, I needed to move at lightning speed to get my laptop moved and ready to go since everything in Switzerland starts on time.

I just made it but I could not help thinking that maybe that train driver at Victoria station had not overslept and that, like me, he was just zoned out and showed up at the wrong train!

Web Intelligence vs. Xcelsius vs. Explorer

By
Paul
Published: July 31, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BI, XcelsiusTags: , , ,
Web Intelligence vs. Xcelsius vs. Explorer

I was recently at a BusinessObjects user group meeting in Pennsylvania and a representative from SAP who was presenting asked the audience of about 50 attendees if any of them were using SAP Explorer. Not a single person raised their hand. He then asked how many of them had seen Explorer and about 10 people raised their hands. The presenter appeared surprised but I was not.

Although SAP has been very heavily promoting the Explorer product for the last couple of years, the adoption of this newer search based query tool has been slow. There are many reasons for this but the one that stands out the most is, that as a Business Intelligence tool, it is limited.  While SAP BusinessObjects offers a number of Business Intelligence tools for different functions, the majority of customers prefer to pick just one or two for mass user consumption and they will tend to pick tools that can provide the widest range of functionality.

I recently conducted an ad-hoc survey of about 200 BusinessObjects customers in the U.S. encompassing small, medium and large companies and found that the top BI tools in use were Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Desktop Intelligence and Xcelsius. When looking at which tools they had most recently added in the last 3 years and were strategic for their future BI initiatives, it was Web Intelligence and Xcelsius.

Web Intelligence is seen as an end-to-end BI reporting and query analysis tool. It has both a web based version and a rich client version to be used off-line. It has good integration with Microsoft through Live Office and use of web parts and overall it has a rich array of functionality for self-service BI.

Xcelsius is probably the best BI data visualization and dashboard tool on the market today. It allows customized development of complete end-to-end BI solutions. It integrates with Microsoft, Adobe, Email, Google, Web as well as a host of other BI solutions. It also has a rich offering of add-on components and functionality to enable write back, alerts and mobile integration.

When we look at SAP Explorer, it is not really in the same category as Web Intelligence and Xcelsius. Explorer is a search web-based query tool for simple end-user ad-hoc analysis with limited reporting and customization ability. It can integrate with other BusinessObjects tools like Web Intelligence and Xcelsius and allows export to Excel but there is no real integration with other applications. It is a great solution for “one off” BI applications but not for end-to-end solutions.

SAP has been previewing the next potential edition of Explorer known as Exploration Views since the beginning of the year and this allows more end-user control and customization of the views.

Both Explorer and Exploration Views demonstrate very nicely and it is easy to get excited when seeing them but then the same could be said for Web Intelligence and Xcelsius.

I am sure we will continue to see more of Explorer but I see the future strength of the SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions remaining with Web Intelligence and Xcelsius for the foreseeable future.

Image Credit: http://www.presentermedia.com

Terabyte, Petabyte, Exabyte, Zettabyte, Yottabyte

By
Paul
Published: July 18, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BI, SapphirenowTags: , ,
Terabyte, Petabyte, Exabyte, Zettabyte, Yottabyte

When I started my career in I.T., one of the first computers I encountered was a Xerox Sigma mainframe that filled a room and played the “Stars and Stripes” tune when it was in idle mode. This large scale computer of its day had a massive 8K of memory.

In the last three decades, we have moved from Kilobytes (KB) to Megabytes (MB) to Terabytes (TB) of memory. This is hard to fathom since it only seemed like yesterday that a Terabyte of disk space was huge and now we are talking about Terabytes of memory. Well maybe not all of us, but certainly the big BI vendors are talking about it a lot.

At this year’s Sapphire event, SAP made a lot of noise about its new High Performance Analytical Appliance (HANA) and the in-memory database it uses that enables real-time business intelligence.  While there were a lot of potential uses for this discussed, there was one that really struck me as both poignant and cool at the same time. It was an energy company in the U.K. that was using HANA to analyze electrical usage patterns for its residential and commercial customers.  They had recently moved to electronic meter readings that were being recorded every four hours generating millions of data readings that could be compared against previous readings over many days. As a result of this analysis, one customer was seen to be using 30% more electricity over a 12 hour period that any other 12 hour period for the previous month. This caused an alert and they called the customer who turned out to be a bakery that had accidently left an oven on overnight!

This energy company is also talking about providing customer facing business intelligence to allow its residential customers to compare their energy usage with their neighbors in the same street or comparable houses in order that they can see if they are possibly using too much.

Real-time business intelligence is not practical for every situation but this example shows that having the ability to house large amounts of data in memory with high speed appliances like HANA can enable valuable analysis to be done in time periods not previously possible.

So as we move into this brave new world of Terabyte memory appliances, what’s next? Well, a quick Google search showed me there is the Petabyte (1024 Terabytes) followed by the Exabyte (1024 Petabytes) followed by the Zettabyte (1024 Exabytes) and then the Yottabyte (1024 Zettabytes or 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes). Just to put this in perspective, Apple cites that the entire contents of all U.S. academic libraries could be stored on just 2 Petabytes

Will any of us be around to see those Yottabyte memory chips? Maybe.

Sapphire Scribbles and Quotes

By
Paul
Published: June 1, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BITags:
Sapphire Scribbles and Quotes

The 2011 joint SAP Sapphire/ASUG Annual Conference came and went in as large a blur as the size of the event itself. With an estimated 14,000 attendees and an overwhelming number of tracks, sessions, demonstrations, meetings and exhibits, the best I could hope for was snapshots and slices of information over the three days.

The panel discussion on the Monday morning keynote turned into a feisty debate between two of the panelists,  well-known scientist and co-founder of the string field theory, Dr. Michio Kaku and  innovative thought leader and author, Michael Schrage.

 Kaku painted a future where we move from commodity capitalism to intellectual capitalism and technology will change the world with imaginative new products like “smart” Barbie dolls! Schrage expressed that the line between infrastructure and applications has become blurred. However when Kaku said that technology enabled individuals will change the world and that we need to educate for the digital economy, Schrage disagreed by saying that a University degree is not going to make a difference and there is a lack of consistency and that we cannot mass produce minds.

 Kaku was not happy and launched into a passionate defense of his point by stating that the US has the worst education system in science in the world ranking top of the “stupid index” and that the only thing that has saved the US from falling behind as an innovator is the H1B Visa. He went on saying that almost 100% of PhD candidates in sciences in the US are foreign born and that there are distorted incentives for Americans in university to study sciences.  The danger the US now faces is that these foreign born scientists now have both choices and incentives to go to other countries besides the US.

The afternoon ASUG keynote featuring Michael Eisner, ex-CEO of Disney, was much tamer. Eisner promoted his new book about successful business partnerships and his seven guiding principles to being successful in business one of which was failure (to be successful you need to fail).

SAP heavily promoted HANA – their new High Performance Analytic Appliance (I know that doesn’t spell HANA but it almost does) with its in-memory database- throughout the conference. The keynotes on Wednesday were almost completely dedicated to HANA with multiple customer testimonials and examples of potential usages. Dr. Hasso Plattner, Chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board and a great favorite at Sapphire meetings, did an excellent job explaining the technology.

Overall there was less emphasis on the SAP BusinessObjects suite compared to last year’s Sapphire even though BI 4.0 is a big new release this year. 

In the SAP Campus areas, there were some very good customer panel discussions with users talking about their successful solution implementations.

As always, there was plenty to see in the Exhibits area from a variety of vendors and the top entertainment award was a tossup between the racing cars at the CA stand and the ball jugglers at Oracle.

Here are a collection of my favorite quotes from the keynotes this year :

“Never confuse a clear vision with a short distance.” – Michael Schrage, Thought Leader and Author

 

“Big brother is not as much a concern as little bother.” – Dr. Michio Kaku, Scientist

“To punish failure is another way to encourage mediocrity.” – Michael Eisner, Former CEO of Disney

 

“The punch card system was aggregation free…. HANA mimics this…” – Prof. Dr. Hasso Plattner, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of SAP AG

If you registered for the conference, you can still visit the sapphirenow website where you can watch on demand replays of some of the sessions.

Blog thumbnail/photo is of Gabriel Byrne talking about in memory computing in the opening keynote Imagining Business In 2015.

IBIS and the Runaway Brides!

By
Paul
Published: May 25, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, IBIS, Paul Blogs on BITags:
IBIS and the Runaway Brides!

Last weekend I went to see my favorite Roller Derby team – the “Runaway Brides” – and they were just awesome out playing the “Schoolyard Scrappers” to a well deserved and convincing win.  Ellie Mayhem the leading jammer for the “Brides” was just pure poetry in motion as she glided past one bemused blocker after another.

But even more awesome was the fact that I did not just get to watch a game, I actually got to watch two full games that evening plus meet the players and have great exchanges with other Roller Derby fans. It was 4 hours of entertainment and social interaction for an amazing price .

Sure they may have been only 500 people there but that was also part of the appeal – I felt important and appreciated.

It is events like these that are not just great value for money but also bring you great overall satisfaction.  And this is exactly what the InfoSol Business Intelligence Seminar (IBIS) is all about – great value and great satisfaction.

IBIS delivers 3 full days of immersion hands-on boot camp training in the most popular BusinessObjects solutions along with the opportunity to meet top Business Intelligence developers and specialists and have great knowledge transfer exchanges with your peers.  There is also the opportunity to see the latest and future BI products in action and hear about inspired customer solutions recently implemented.

The immersion boot camps which include Xcelsius Beginner, Xcelsius Master, Web Intelligence Master, Crystal Reports 2008 Master and Xcelsius Data caching with InfoBurst are particularly unique.  Hands-on education for these topics at this level is difficult to find.

The best part of all is that the IBIS package includes 3 nights of luxury accommodations at the breathtaking Ritz Carlton Laguna Niguel resort overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, all group meals, resort fees, taxes, and free internet.

Last week, I met a BI Director of a major global corporation at the SAP Sapphire conference who commented that while Sapphire was a huge event attended by thousands, it did not compare to IBIS in terms of its first class venues and overall value.

I could not agree more.

Photo Credit: Snip taken from http://www.arizonaderbydames.com/site/press/ all rights reserved.

Keeping IT Executives Current with BI Technology

By
Paul
Published: May 5, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, IBIS, InfoSol, Paul Blogs on BITags: , , ,
Keeping IT Executives Current with BI Technology

I recently interviewed a college student who told me that his ambition was to be an IT Director.  He was completing a college program in computer security and had worked as an intern doing network support in the IT department at a large organization.  I did not want to burst his bubble, but most IT Directors I know spend half their time dealing with budgets and administration processes, and the other half in meetings.  They spend very little time exploring and brainstorming over new technologies, innovations and ideas for revolutionizing IT in their organizations.

However, a successful IT Director does need to keep abreast of current and new technologies and IT innovations and compare their processes and ideas with their peers in other companies and organizations.  Unfortunately it is often a challenge to find both the time and the forum to do this effectively.

At best, most IT Directors will only have time to attend one or two conferences or technical seminars a year.  Most such forums typically last three days and will run multiple tracks to provide more choice to a wider audience.  Some events try to be more generic in terms of technology but most will be specific to particular applications, software products or technologies.  However, these types of conferences tend to be put on or sponsored by software application or technology companies, resulting in a disproportionate number of marketing oriented sessions to promote products rather than to educate.

It was with these factors and IT managers, directors and executives in mind that InfoSol created a series of highly informative executive seminars at this year’s InfoSol Business Intelligence Seminar (IBIS).

IBIS is well known for its hands-on immersion training boot camps on different BusinessObjects products, but there has been an increasing demand for concentrated and effective seminars on key  new Business Intelligence technologies as well as how to effectively utilize the latest and greatest BusinessObjects solutions.

There are three Executive Seminar tracks at IBIS 2011.  One covers the new and enhanced offerings with the latest release of the SAP BusinessObjects suite, namely XI4.0.  The sessions in this track will both explain and demonstrate live the new capabilities and educate attendees on their key benefits.

A second track (The Next Generation of BI) covers new and emerging BI technologies with particular emphasis on mobile BI which is of great interest to all these days.  There are also sessions in this track on geographic BI solutions, in memory databases for BI and integrating with internet data sources and applications.

The third executive track (Business Intelligence for Executives) is designed for managers and executives to have a better understanding of all the facets involved in planning, managing and executing a successful BI project.

In addition to the information packed seminars, there are case study demonstrations, customer and expert panel discussions, and plenty of opportunity to have real quality one-on-one information exchanges with peers.

The entire event is limited to no more than 250 attendees, ensuring that it remains a productive and quality gathering for everyone.

I hope you will join us at this year’s InfoSol Business Intelligence Seminar.

Rod Stewart and Business Intelligence in Concert

By
Paul
Published: April 19, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, Business Objects, Paul Blogs on BI, Products, Xcelsius, Xcelsius End UserTags:
Rod Stewart and Business Intelligence in Concert

I just saw Rod Stewart in concert last week and he was truly awesome. The musicians and singers supporting him were just fantastic and the whole set was so tight and so professional. It felt as though they had been playing together for years but they actually had only started rehearsing a couple of months ago.

Of course, Rod Stewart is now in his late sixties and has been performing professionally for more than 40 years. He has always been a great entertainer and he knows his art to near perfection. He knows what to look and listen for in the people who support him and he knows what the audience likes and how to woo them.  His choice of songs from his incredible repertoire was spot on incorporating well known hits like “Maggie May”,  “Do you think I’m Sexy”,  and “Have I told you Lately” with some of his best songs like “Reason to Believe” ,  “The First Cut is the Deepest” and  “Hot Legs”.  His showmanship was in fine form too from kicking and heading soccer balls into the audience to getting down on all fours and worshipping the stunning stilettos of the very attractive female mandolin player!

The set lasted well over two hours but it was one of those concerts where you just did not want to end.  I left with a sense of euphoria and a desire to tell everyone about what I had just experienced (hence this blog).

I both attend and deliver a lot of Business Intelligence “shows”. To find that perfect combination of presentation, demonstration and connecting with your audience is not always easy. It takes practice, experience and, like Rod Stewart, a certain amount of showmanship.

Recently I had to deliver a presentation and demonstration of the complete SAP BusinessObjects product suite in one hour.  It is simply not possible to include everything in a meaningful way in that time so I focused  on the “well known hits” of Web Intelligence for reporting , ad-hoc query and analysis and Xcelsius for dashboards and “what if” scenarios. I had to explain the tools, demonstrate their usage as an end user and as a developer.

The customer was in the insurance business so I had one of my band members create fictitious data and scenarios for their specific industry. I also rehearsed the demo many times to make sure I could fit everything in the time allotted. I actually ran through it three times just before arriving at the customer site.

In the presentation room, everything was set up and just 5 minutes before the start, I plugged in a network cable and my Virtual Machine with the server software on it froze up!

Never happens – right?

Actually, it happens all too often. I quickly rebooted the Virtual Machine knowing it would take 10 to 15 minutes to fully reload and started the presentation on time showing my first PowerPoint slides while the server was rebooting in the background.  I managed to complete all the demonstrations within the hour and covered the Business Intelligence portal, Data Quality, Metadata Management and the semantic layer abstraction for good measure.

There were about 25 people present and I played to my audience making sure I had their attention and responding to their reactions as their eyes lit up with the data visualization in Xcelsius and the drag-and-drop magic in Web Intelligence.

They actually applauded at the end. I did not get the wild standing ovation that Rod Stewart got at the end of his set but then again, I did not have soccer balls to kick and stunning stilettos to worship!

Improving Xcelsius Performance and Scalability with InfoBurst the “Fresh and Easy” Way

By
Paul
Published: March 23, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, InfoBurst, Paul Blogs on BITags:
Improving Xcelsius Performance and Scalability with InfoBurst the “Fresh and Easy” Way

I love those commercials for “Fresh and Easy” supermarkets where they use actual customers to talk about their products and explain they do this to save money on expensive actors and actresses and pass on those savings to help keep their products at such great prices.

Now, this may or may not be true but what I love is the concept of real customers talking about and promoting your products. I always enjoy attending sessions at conferences where customers present and talk about how they are using a product because they tend to tell it as it is – both the good and the bad.

So I was really excited when I recently heard about a webinar on Xcelsius and what’s new in the BOE 4.0 release. While the new features were being presented by representatives from the SAP Product group responsible for Xcelsius, there was also a lot of dialog going on in the Chat Window between the two hundred or so participants.

Someone asked the question about being able to burst and publish with Xcelsius. Within literally seconds, a customer by the name of Mike responded with:

“InfoBurst can burst Xcelsius already and is working with XI 3.1”.

A few seconds later, another customer, Gabe, chimed in:

“Yes and it can also imbed a xlf in an in-line html email”

Mike then added more:

“We had a need to burst to 3,000 sales reps their commissions, so we use InfoBurst”

Yet another customer, Jeanine, now entered the conversation:

“We use the InfoBurst and utilize the xml features – schedule Webi report to run at 3am, creates xml files, use the data connector in Xcelsius to pull the xml and publish the dashboard to InfoView.  Info on demand!”

Another user, Mark, was interested by Jeanine’s comment and asked:

“How many manual steps do you have in that process vs. automated…?”

Jeanine responded:

“Just the setup is intense but haven’t touched it in over 6 months – runs daily for a 300 user base.”

The neat thing about this entire dialog was that it was open, honest and no vendor was involved in any of the exchanges yet it is more valuable in promoting and marketing InfoBurst with its Xcelsius Data Caching and dashboard bursting capabilities than any conventional sales or marketing promotion.

There have been a lot of enquiries since this webinar regarding how InfoBurst and Xcelsius Data Caching can improve connected dashboard performance, manage large amounts of data in Xcelsius applications and burst offline dashboards so, we figure the customer driven marketing really works.  Fresh and Easy must know that too because those commercials keep coming!

Special thanks to Mike, Gabe, Jeanine and Mark for your great input – this blog is dedicated to you!

Disclaimer: fresh & easy Neighborhood Markets is a copyrighted trademark and the use of the name in this blog is purely to give credit that this blog post was inspired by the concept of their radio commercials.  Some of our employees shop there and that is the extent of our relationship.

Sustainability from the “Loco Gringo”

By
Paul
Published: February 22, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, Costa Rica 2011, Paul Blogs on BITags: ,
Sustainability from the “Loco Gringo”

Esperanza, Costa Rica – February 4th, 2011

I am in the middle of a tropical rain forest halfway up an incredibly tall and steep mountain.  My feet are slipping so I grab a nearby branch as sharp thorns dig into my palm.  I pull my hand away sharply and place my other hand on the ground to break my fall but I quickly pull that back as I feel sharp stings.  I look at one hand covered in blood and the other covered in biting red ants.  The temperature is in the 90’s with high humidity but the jungle canopy keeps the strongest rays of the sun at bay.  Every piece of my clothing is dripping in sweat.  My calf muscles are burning from the climb and I feel a mixture of extreme fatigue and numbness come over my whole body.  Ahead of me, three Costa Rican natives are cutting a path with machetes.  It was a smart move not to give me one as I would definitely have cut off one of my appendages by now!

Climbing the jungle

Not only are those guys climbing but they are constantly swinging and chopping through dense jungle.  They pause and look down at the “Loco Gringo” as they call me.  I smile and they shake their heads and laugh.  They laugh because we are only about half way up with another hour of climbing ahead.  They laugh because my brother who lives in Costa Rica stopped thirty minutes earlier unable to go further and they are just waiting for me to do the same.

I look at a log in front of me and see pieces of leaves moving across it as though they had legs.  I realize these are ants carrying those objects that are over twenty times larger than themselves.  I follow the trail with my eyes and see many, many different lines of ants of all sizes and colors industriously working away, climbing vertically as well as horizontally.  Inspired by these remarkable insects, I picked myself up carrying my backpack which is about one twentieth of my size and weight and headed on.

I start to pay more attention to the incredible rain forest ecosystem around me.  I see dead tree trunks further decomposed by termites, leaves underfoot turning to mulch, crawling and flying insects everywhere and new growth all around.  I realize that this rain forest is totally self-sustainable.

Sustainability has become a major initiative being undertaken by many corporations today.  For the larger companies, specific goals have been set to reduce their carbon footprint over the coming years.  The three main areas of focus are Reduce, Reuse and Recycle – in that order.

Business Intelligence has been playing a vital role in both identifying areas where sustainability actions can be made as well as monitoring and measuring the overall results.

Almost three years ago, InfoSol introduced its Green Services offering consulting and knowledge transfer options remotely.  This saves on all the carbon emissions attributable to travel and accommodations.  Not only is this more sustainable but it saves on employee travel time and these savings are passed on to the clients by the services themselves being less expensive.  In addition, InfoSol pays for the planting of a tree for every hour of Green Services purchased which has resulted in thousands more trees being planted.

The “Loco Gringo” did make it all the way up (about 2.5 hours of climbing) unaided and much to the surprise of my colleagues.  Now, coming down was something else.  My spectacular falls really gave those Howler Monkeys something to howl about!

BI Hats

By
Paul
Published: February 15, 2011Posted in: Business Intelligence, Costa Rica 2011, Paul Blogs on BITags: , , , ,
BI Hats

Puntarenas, Costa Rica – February 3rd, 2011

Exactly one week after being in a major snow storm in Philadelphia, I find myself boarding a ferry in Puntarenas, Costa Rica in 97 degree heat.  I am on my way to visit my brother who currently is in the middle of the jungle in the Nicoya Peninsula.

I see a man wearing over 20 hats on his head that he is trying to sell.  I think to myself that this is quite a good way to advertise yourself because he looks ridiculous and people cannot help but stop and look at him.  Of course, I did look and he immediately saw the moment of hesitation in my eyes and pounced.  I had to buy one, it was only $6 – what a bargain!

 It also made me think about the multiple hats that many of us have to wear working in the field of business intelligence which includes so many facets including data warehouse design and creation, ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Load), data quality, universe views, reports and dashboards.  While larger corporations and entities may have different people assigned to the individual tasks, most organizations will expect business intelligence personnel to do many or sometimes all of these tasks.  Some actually have experience that allows them to take on all of the responsibilities but they often end up like the man in Costa Rica, wearing all those hats and looking somewhat strange as they try to do it all.

There are definitely advantages in specializing in the different disciplines, not least of which is that you will need dedicated expertise in them that covers both the business and the technical side of the area.  To be a truly effective business intelligence report designer and developer for the finance department, you need to understand finance processes for finance, the finance data and the business intelligence tools.

As business intelligence becomes more and more significant in every organization, it might be worth thinking about getting more people to wear those different BI hats.

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