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.

This year Xcelsius dashboards shared the limelight with Mobile Business Intelligence in terms of the most popular topics being discussed amongst attendees.

There was also some buzz around the new BusinessObjects XI 4.0 release promising to be the first truly integrated business intelligence platform. While there were a few small demonstrations of some of the new XI 4.0 products in the general session, most of the other sessions stuck to slides and pre-recorded Camtasia demonstrations.  With the release moving to “ramp up” stage in November, the kimono was only half opened on some of the new features and functions. These included the new Data Services that will now incorporate Text Analytics in addition to Data Integrator and Data Quality in a single engine solution. Also, there is the new Universal Metadata Layer that not only combines Business Views and Universes but also now provides direct access to Multidimensional OLAP data sources.

Part of the integration approach with XI 4.0  is to provide common services across all the main content provider tools like Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius, Explorer. These include a common query panel for accessing data through a universe so in the new Xcelsius Enterprise 4.0 developers would have access to universe objects while building the dashboard.

An updated Web Intelligence brings new charting libraries from the Explorer product and an update Crystal Reports delivers a new grid view with drag and drop on graphics capability.

Common platform services like Auditing and Life Cycle Manager now extend across all the content provider tools including Xcelsius.

SAP’s new solution for in-memory analytics, known as HANA (High performance ANalytical Appliance), was also discussed.

Once the ramp up period gets underway, we will have a better chance to more thoroughly explore the new features and functions but based on this sneak preview, there appears to be some promising new functionality in XI 4.

The one technology in recent years that has managed to captivate the business users in organizations across the globe is undoubtedly – Dashboards.  Dashboards speak to them in a language which they are familiar with, the language of graphs, charts and metrics.  The BI Dashboard serves as an abstraction layer that shields the business users from the intricate and unwelcoming world of the ‘Data Churners’.  It is this instrument therefore, that should be leveraged to enlighten the management of financial losses that are incurred due to a seemingly trivial typo error or a misplaced digit in the sales figures.  Although this may not be the panacea one is looking for, creating a real-time dashboard which attaches a price tag to every data quality issue and extrapolates the figures to demonstrate their long term impact, may just act like a sip of coffee that will stimulate their business senses.

 Here’s an example of a Data Quality Dashboard

 This dashboard was the outcome of the convergence of three technologies: BO Data Quality,  InfoBurst 2009,  and Xcelsius.  Bundling a DQ dashboard with DQ Services benefits in the following ways: 

• Getting the initial buy in from the senior management
• Understanding the DQ issues that are creating havoc
• Tracking the performance of the DQ initiative itself
• Displaying the relevant financial metrics to answer the ROI question

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Photo Credit: Sieve photo in this post from Wikimedia