When I arrived at the client I was visiting that day in Oman, I had to wait in the security hut until someone came to pick me up. The security guard did not speak English but I tried to strike up a conversation anyway. I told him that I had seen camels on my drive there. I could see he did not understand the word camel so I took a pen and paper and drew a picture of a camel. As soon as he recognized what it was I was drawing, he jumped up in the air and shouted “Jamel” (hence I discovered the Arabic word for camel!).

He then grabbed his mobile phone and excitedly showed me pictures of himself with camels. I quickly determined that he owned eight camels and he named them all and from his expressions I realized they were a great source of joy to him. He spoke about them like they were his children and he had pictures where he was kissing and hugging them.

At my meeting, the client was explaining how they wanted to look at utility usage in addition to production line equipment usage over time. Although the production line itself was fully automated, the meter and machine readings were manually read and recorded. We discussed ways that the readings could be captured automatically and fed into a database and displayed and analyzed through a Business Intelligence dashboard. They were very excited about this but when I mentioned how much time this could save the supervisor in the morning since he would not have to collect the information manually any more, the supervisor spoke up. He explained that when he toured the factory floor each morning, he not only collected the meter readings but he spoke to the people on duty and found out if there were any issues or problems over the last 24 hours and gathered a lot of other useful information. He spoke fondly of this responsibility and his relationship with both the workers and the machinery. It actually reminded me of the way the security guard had spoken about his camels.

Interestingly, it was this very supervisor who was the main instigator behind the idea of bringing in business intelligence dashboards to the company. We agreed that there were plenty of other great benefits to automating the data collection into the dashboards without changing his daily factory floor tour. This was an inspired supervisor who loved his job and his company and clearly saw the importance of maintaining both the data analysis and the human action parts of their operation in harmony.

Taking advantage of technology while maintaining the essence of what makes an organization run smoothly creates intelligent and sustainable processes.

The next morning as I was leaving the hotel I saw three camels grazing on the manicured grass in front of the entrance. These are smart camels, I thought – taking advantage of man-made technology to sustain themselves!

Driving down the main 14-lane highway through the center of the city with massive new skyscrapers on each side, I felt like I was in a scene from Disney’s movie Tron.  Outside of rush hours the traffic moves fast and you better keep up or you will end up in an accident. After 45 minutes of speeding through the concrete jungle, I find myself in the middle of desert which is where my first customer that I am visiting is located.

They are a large manufacturer who is planning to double their output capacity in the next two years.  They have big plans and moving fast which is par for the course in this part of the world but they also have a great need for business intelligence to track and analyze in order to make informed decisions. Today they are primarily tracking their strategic objectives and key performance indicators manually and reviewing them monthly with no real visibility on a daily or even weekly basis. Labor intensive manual dashboards are being created in Microsoft Word and printed on poster size charts that sit in managers’ offices.

While the need for automated and visual Business Intelligence using tools like Xcelsius may appear obvious, the main ERP and production applications are still being rolled out and have an even higher priority than BI. In addition, they have defined standards for which technology should be used for their future BI solutions.

After spending time listening to the Project Manager responsible for the current manual dashboards, I realize that the final BI solution will take time and it will need to be implemented step by step and synchronized with all the other projects in progress. To try to fast track the solution would be a mistake and probably lead to inaccurate results which in turn would result to its rejection and demise.

Replacing manual systems with slick BI solutions may lead to dazzling and cool looking visual interfaces but the foundation must be solid and the functionality that exists in the manual system must all be there.

Even in a place like Dubai where massive buildings seem to appear overnight, the foundation and design must be solid or they will all just come crumbling down.

I love Indian food and London offers some of the best around. It has in fact become the National food of Great Britain where there are more Indian restaurants than English ones! Well this turned out to be a very expensive Indian meal because as we returned from the restaurant, there were two police officers waiting for us outside my sister’s house. Apparently, someone had tried to break in through the basement by smashing two windows. The only thing stolen was my laptop which the thieves had pulled out through the window by the power cord.

I say the only thing, but losing my laptop is like losing my right arm. All my presentations, demonstrations and everything for my next two weeks of overseas meetings was on there. I was in a state of disbelief as the police officer took down my statement.

The next morning, I found myself in front of a group of people eagerly awaiting a presentation and demonstration on connected Xcelsius dashboards using the InfoBurst XML Data Cache. So I pulled out my iPad and connected to the projector and showed the whole thing running off the iPad and it all looked and worked just the same. At the end I gave thanks to both Steve Jobs for making this remarkable device and to the InfoBurst development team for making Xcelsius dashboards run on an operating system that does not support Flash.

I was not the only one thanking the InfoBurst development team that day. In the afternoon, I visited a large InfoBurst customer in London who were about to install their third production server license of InfoBurst. They told me that they felt the product had been built just for them and actually thanked InfoSol for creating it!

I took notes at the meeting on my iPad and emailed the InfoBurst development team back in the US all the customer feedback as we adjourned.

In just 24 hours not only had I forgotten about my stolen laptop but I was starting to wonder if I even needed it again.

We hope you can join us at the next information packed Bay Area BusinessObjects™ User Group (Northern California) meeting on Monday, May 7, 2012, 8:00 am – 4:30 pm hosted by Creative Technology & Training Solutions and InfoSol.

Attendance is free, however; we do ask that you register for count purposes.

LOCATION

 AZBOCUG

We also hope you can join us at the next information packed Arizona Business Objects and Crystal User Group (AZBOCUG) meeting Thursday, May 10, 2012, 12:30-4:00 PM.

Attendance is free, however; we do ask that you register for count purposes.

LOCATION

The meeting will be held in Room Q120 – Building Q, Room 120. Building Q is located at the south end of campus off of Grovers Avenue. There is parking in the WEST parking lot.  Location map here.

View Agenda

 InfoSol will be presenting at both of these meetings.  We hope to see you there.

InfoBurst enables Xcelsius dashboards to handle large amounts of data with fast performance using its powerful XML data caching capability and to deliver those dashboards both connected and off-line to a variety of destinations including mobile devices like iPads and Androids. Some of the InfoBurst Xcelsius features include :

• An XML data cache able to support millions of rows of data for fast access from Xcelsius dashboards
• A write back connector for Xcelsius allowing write back from the dashboard to any database
• A “Save as Excel” function enabling the dashboard contents to be saved in Excel
• Creation , customized bursting and intelligent delivery of offline dashboards

http://www.bpms.co.uk/events/infoburst-test-drive—19th-april.aspx

Excerpt: Infoburst Test Drive – 19th April
blueprint uk performance management, financial planning & budgeting, business intelligence and data warehousing services allow clients to visualise and control the processes that directly affect success with professional…

The first was Xcelsius, the data visualization dashboard tool that rocketed first Business Objects and then SAP to the forefront of business intelligence dashboard solutions. Santiago once told me that the idea for Xcelsius came about after a casual conversation with one of his sons, who was a computer game developer, about making business applications more visual and interactive like computer games. Santiago had created “Gamification” before it had even become a word (according to Wikipedia it was first used in March 2004 several years after Xcelsius was created). Xcelsius was not only ahead of its time, it was a game changer for Business Objects after they acquired the company from Santiago in late 2005 as within two years it was their hottest selling product and was taking over as the user interface of choice for business intelligence.

Roambi Cardex on iPad

After seeing Xcelsius successfully settled into Business Objects, Santiago moved into semi-retirement but his visionary mind could not stop conjuring up new ideas. After seeing a line of people queuing up for an iPhone, he bought one for himself and became intrigued by its visual display capabilities. This led to inspired, revolutionary BI solution number 2. Gathering together some of the original team that had made Xcelsius successful and some very talented developers, he created the most spectacular BI visualization solution ever seen on a mobile device – Roambi. Today, Roambi is the leading BI visualization solution for mobile devices with a plethora of awards and an ever increasing global presence, Some of the Roambi views like Cardex and Squares have got to be seen to be believed (especially on the iPad) – these are designs of pure genius. You can download demo versions for free off the iTunes store.

Roambi Squares on iPad

Needless to say, I was ecstatic when Santiago Becerra agreed to deliver the keynote address at this year’s IBIS 2012 event. With the theme of the conference being Inspired Business Intelligence 2.0, it is a perfect match-up. Few people have contributed more than Santiago to inspiring the world of Business Intelligence.

Equally as exciting, is a new executive seminar track at this year’s IBIS also entitled Inspired Business Intelligence 2.0 that will consist of 12 customer presented case studies on some pretty cool and inspired BI solutions. The final list of customer presentations will be announced in a couple of weeks so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I suggest you reserve a place at IBIS 2012 very soon as the event is limited to just 250 attendees and seats are filling up fast.

Register now.

What a fantastic idea to restore these masterpieces and put them to the use they were built for rather than send them to a museum or scrapyard. A friend told me that the city was able to do this because the tram track gauge was standard and as long as the trams came from cities that used the same track standard they could be used.

After the weekend, I was visiting a software company in Silicon Valley and talking about Business Intelligence solutions on mobile devices. One of the options we discussed was using Xcelsius dashboards on mobile devices.

Now, Xcelsius is undoubtedly one of the best and most popular data visualization tools for the PC but it was designed and developed for the PC using a mouse to navigate. A mobile device like an iPad, iPhone or Android has no mouse and navigation is through touch gestures. The standard dashboard components that ship with Xcelsius were never designed for touch gesture usage and often come up short when used on a mobile device.

Yet Xcelsius is such a versatile and great tool for developing customized dashboards so wouldn’t it be great if you could use it to create dashboards with components that are designed for mobile devices including touch gestures?

Well, that has recently become a reality thanks to a truly innovative solution from Xcelsius component developer, Inovista. They have created a whole set of Xcelsius add-on components designed for mobile devices and touch gestures along with a mobile application that transforms the resulting Xcelsius dashboard into a native iOS or Android application. This allows you to use the Xcelsius toolset you know, love and have invested in and build dazzling mobile dashboards. The resulting dashboards can also be used on the PC.

To make the solution even richer, it also supports the popular and powerful InfoBurst Xcelsius connector options. This includes the direct database connector for fast direct access to databases, the XML Data Cache connector for accessing large amounts of cache data for improved dashboard performance, the XML Data Cache Query connector for using SQL from your dashboard to access selected data from the cache and the Write Back connector that allows you to write back to databases from your dashboard.

Another cool thing about this solution is that the dashboards can be either offline on the mobile device itself or connected to live data giving you the best of both worlds.

I have some of these mobile dashboards running on my iPad and they are both compelling and fast. Some of these will be featured at IBIS 2012.

As we hear more about HTML5 being the future direction for dashboards and mobile business intelligence, it is still evolving and the toolsets that are equivalent to Xcelsius are yet to emerge. The recent announcement that Xcelsius will move in the HTML5 direction is also some way off in the future.

Businesses need solutions today built with tried and tested tools. The idea of using Xcelsius to build mobile friendly dashboards with the Inovista and InfoBurst components allows you to leverage your Xcelsius investment and create easily maintainable and sustainable mobile BI solutions. It’s almost as cool as San Francisco using restored classic trams on their streets!

For those of you unfamiliar with this American rite of spring, every March there is a series of college basketball tournaments for larger colleges which form a group called the NCAA that starts with 68 teams from across the country and game after game eliminates teams until we get to a final game which will determine the best college basketball team in the country. There are actually two tournaments running, one for women and the other for men. If you don’t think this isn’t a big deal, consider that when Prime Minister Cameron from the UK came to visit this March President Obama took him first to a NCAA basketball game! Not only is it a big deal for the players and the national interest, but few offices are devoid of an office pool betting on the eventual winner with prizes that can run into the thousands. Even an 11 year-old student in Nebraska was caught running a betting pool for the tournament this year with a $5 entry fee for each student interested.

While it might be a huge loss for the economy with the distractions and hard feelings of losing fans, it is a wonderful example of how we can work better in our organizations. How might you ask? Well, the first hint is that this is a BI blog. BI is all about getting people to see, understand and most importantly act on data.

The last part is sometimes the most difficult piece but is often addressed with simple, but effective, social engineering and psychology. To give an example let me tell you a story of a plant that I used to work at.

One of the processes involved separating thin sheets of metal by slightly bending the whole thing and then sliding a set of metal bars between the cracks caused by the bending and separating them. Care had to be taken not to bend the sheets too much or to crush the corners of the thin sheet of metal resulting in scrap which had to be melted down and processed at a loss.

We had several teams who had to do this physically demanding, dangerous and boring work. This was no one’s favorite task and the scrap rates and injuries of cut fingers were atrocious. It would be easy to simply blame the process and say that high scrap rates were inevitable in such a manual and sensitive process. After all, a million different variables could affect the outcome, why not just leave the process alone and worry about other things? Besides, the employees would just say that they needed automated equipment which the plant couldn’t afford and we’d be right back where we started at. Injuries were their fault for not paying attention so everyone should just move on.

Fortunately, along came a very smart manager who saw this not a problem of process or equipment, but rather a problem of people. The manager put together a scrap rate calculation for each team that was working this process. When the manager looked at the data he saw that some teams were just flat out better than others in both safety and productivity. His solution, not to cross train, not to reassign resources, it was to put a copy of his analysis on the wall.

That’s right, he simply published his work. Instantly, the worst performing team at the plant improved by reducing their scrap rate by almost 40%. The best team actually improved even more and although they couldn’t consistently hit 100% good quality, they were very close and went days without a reject. Injury rates dropped to zero with no reportable injuries for years. How exactly did this happen? Could it be repeated?

The answer to those questions is simple and clear. People respond to the motivation of competition. We are hard-wired from our caveman days to compete for resources and to be the best at what we do. No one wants to be on the team that gets blown away in the quality and safety scoring. Being the loser is no fun, but it was something that could be affected, and so they did!

As BI consultants we often refer to this phenomenon of self-correction with phrases like, “Measurement alone changes outcome.” This is one of the biggest values of BI as it helps focus people on what needs to be changed in their organizations. Of course the downside of this natural measurement effect is that sometimes watching a particular value or metric creates problems with perverse incentivisation which is a separate blog…or five.

Now to the question of repeatability; recently we put a dashboard in place at an Aluminum refinery in Europe and found a similar situation where one shift was significantly underperforming compared to its peers. The result from publishing the data was that the shift supervisors got together with their compatriots in the other shifts and asked some hard questions about what they could do differently to change their scores. This process took place outside of a top-down driven project and reduced the “bad” shifts scrap rates from the mid-20% range of quality to the low 10% range. Competition is a very powerful motivator and can almost never be over-estimated in its impact.

So how can you do this at your companies? Well, one, embrace it. No one wants their employees slashing each other’s tires in the parking lot, but that doesn’t mean you can’t engender a sense of positive rivalry and competition in your organization. The trick is to put together KPI’s and metrics which follow a simple pattern below and then publish the KPI’s with rewards and celebration for winners. Competitions should be regular (monthly or quarterly is the longest) and the rules should allow new teams to get the top spot on a regular basis. Rewards need not be significant, but $50 worth of pizza for lunch on the company with the plant manager in attendance for the winners is surprisingly effective. It tells them that not only did they do well; but that even the top dog is there to celebrate and congratulate them…who doesn’t want their boss to be proud of them?

The trick now is to make sure that you have a fair and even playing field. One of the great things about the NCAA basketball tournament mentioned earlier is that even though some schools present teams which are considered unbeatable every year there are multiple Cinderella stories of small schools, unknown coaches and undersized teams going way further than anyone expected of them. In fact 8 different winning teams have taken home the trophy since 2000.

Here are some tactics when building competitions in your organizations. While this isn’t a complete list, make sure you think through these items:

• Ensure an even playing field. All teams should have both a realistic chance of winning if they work hard, but also that one team doesn’t have a significant advantage that will turn off the other “players”. Nothing is worse than feeling that the game is stacked against you. Teams can be teams of one of course, but if one team has one person and the others are staffed with 10 people, one side or the other will not be happy!

• Clear goals, rules and referees – transparency over complexity. It is imperative that the players know the rules, the refs, and the way the points are tallied. How can people improve their score if they don’t know its calculation? This can be very difficult to do as sometimes the scores are difficult to calculate without serious math that can be manipulated by the players if they know the exact formula but it can be done. Sometimes you have to get simple!

• Play fair. This sounds obvious but one company I was at found out that the players had some assistance from the stands. Other employees outside of the measured group were changing data in the system to reward their friends. The result was that the offending 6 employees (including 2 supervisors) were fired and the rules of the game were understood to really matter. This wasn’t an overreaction; people were getting bonuses based on their performance. Stealing from the company is no laughing matter!

• Make games that positively affect the final score. Most of us work for companies which are pursuing a profit. Senior management is only going to be interested in games which help the bottom line and can be identified as being positive for the company and not just an exercise in team building or an expensive morale booster. Make it clear how your game affects net income and remind everyone why this game matters to the bottom line.

• Consistency and endurance. The NCAA tournament wasn’t a success overnight and games should be constructed for the long run. If you are going to do this; do it as you promised. Having one team’s bad numbers published one month and their improvement never posted is a real morale killer.

• Review and Report. One of the biggest problems with people putting together games is the lack of review. The results of a game should be very public, not just who won and loss, but also the impact on the company. If people know that it wasn’t just an exercise they will respect the management vision and also the next game that comes along. It may happen that one game will lose its value over time or become redundant, but when everyone knows what is going on there will be understanding, even if hesitant, over the required changes.

• Avoid complex and overly-long games. The temptation might be to measure and reward every single activity but that is neither advisable nor particularly valuable. People can only respond to so many motivators before they become overwhelmed and lose their desire to compete. Think of the NCAA teams. If they had to play a game of basketball, soccer, football, chess, badminton and cricket against each other to determine the winner would you watch? While there certainly would be some brave souls who would compete, would it have the same level of competition and energy? Games should have a laser focus on a particular trouble spot that has a reward for everyone.

I hope that I’ve put some ideas in your head that will get you thinking about what you can do with your KPI’s to truly change your business. Putting them on the wall and buying lunch can make a surprising difference and just because this is a simple solution doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a part of your vision to utilize the data in your organization. Too many times we make KPI’s and don’t put them in the hands of the people who can truly affect them. KPI’s aren’t just for the CEO you know!

What have you seen work in your organizations? I can’t be the only one who has used this technique…am I?

Photo Credit: © Justin Smith / Wikimedia Commons, CC-By-SA-3.0

However when it comes to SAP BusinessObjects training, the deals traditionally tend to be somewhat fewer and more conservative. In a survey that InfoSol conducted last year amongst BusinessObjects users, one of the main reasons cited for not attending an SAP BusinessObjects training class was cost.

As an Authorized SAP BusinessObjects Education Partner, InfoSol will frequently offer special deals on training courses from discounts to giving free SAP Press books with certain courses.

At the same time, more and more people are finding that they simply do not have the time to attend a 2-day or 3-day instructor led training course or that they need to train people from many different locations and the cost of bringing them all together in one place on top of the cost of the training itself is way too high. For this reason self-learning or e-learning courses have become increasingly popular. These courses allow you to train from anywhere at any time.

However, the downside to e-learning is that you have no instructor or topic expert to go to ask questions if you do not understand something. This can diminish the effectiveness of the training as well as cause great frustration for the learner.

So InfoSol has put together a new training offering that brings the best of all worlds together: BusinessObjects Certified e-learning courses, and access to a live instructor, all for a “deal of the century” price. We’re calling it the E-Learning Plus Offering

InfoSol is now offering the new SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Subscription Library which offers more than 60 BusinessObjects E-Learning courses, everything from Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Xcelsius, Explorer, Live Office to the new BI 4.0 offerings along with up to 90 minutes access to a live instructor. You have access to all these courses on-line and the instructor for a period of 12 months. You can take as many as you like as many times as you want. In addition, if any new courses are released while you are subscribed, you will have access to those as well at no additional charge.

So how much do you think this would cost? Well if you subscribed to all those courses individually, the cost would in excess of $10,000 and the subscription period would only be 6 months and that would not include access to a live instructor.

The cost for this new InfoSol BO E-Learning Plus offering for 12 months is just $2,000! Incredible!

If you need additional live instructor assistance beyond the 90 minutes, you can purchase additional time at a special discounted price.

In addition to the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Subscription Library, there is also the SAP BusinessObjects Administration and Data Services Subscription Library with over 40 courses on BusinessObjects Administration, Migration, Universe Design and Data Services (Data Integrator, Data Quality). This library is available also for 12 months with up to 90 minutes of access to a live instructor at the same $2,000 price.

So how do you sign up for the “Deal of the Century”?  Just email education@infosol.com.

A .pdf copy of the article which I wrote based on my presentation can be accessed from their website http://www.aluminiumtoday.com/features.

When I delivered a keynote session at an Aluminium Conference in Oman last November, I was addressing an audience of Aluminium experts and executives. In addition, most of the participants were from the Arabian Gulf or other countries around the world and English was not their first language. Even if it was, I quickly learned that only in the US it is pronounced “Aluminum” whereas the rest of the world says “Aluminium”! (turn up your speaker volume and listen here)

Every other presentation had been directly and specifically related to the Aluminium industry and mine was entitled “Inspired Business Intelligence”.

So what, may you ask, has Inspired Business Intelligence and the Aluminium industry got to do with each other?

The answer is absolutely everything as I clearly showed in my Blog last November – Dashboards Making Big Waves at Omani Aluminium Company

After explaining to the audience what business intelligence is through a series of examples and then what inspired business intelligence was all about, I showed how two very different Aluminium companies had used business intelligence dashboards to both improve their operation and help initiate a culture change within their organizations.

sample dashboard

InfoSol has been developing business intelligence solutions in the mining and metals industries for a number of years and we have built up a solid expertise around the unique reporting challenges and key metrics used to monitor performance for these companies. This includes initiatives around safety, environment and sustainability which have become very prominent in these industries in the last few years. Some of these solutions will be presented and demonstrated in the Inspired Business Intelligence Solutions 2.0 Case Study track at IBIS 2012 in June.

InfoSol will also be exhibiting at The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) annual conference held in Orlando, Florida from March 11-15. TMS 2012 is expected to attract over 4,000 industry leaders from over 70 countries and this year they will be treated to some Inspired Business Intelligence.

All-in-all, it looks like the Aluminium industry is getting pretty excited about inspired business intelligence and especially BI dashboards and we are getting equally excited with the future prospect of an inspired Aluminium industry.