Paul Blogs on BI

At the beginning of 2011, I made 5 predictions in terms of Business Intelligence trends for the year and I thought it would be interesting to look back on the year and see how those predictions turned out. So here goes : Prediction 1: Visual Dashboards will remain dominant as ...

Oman is known for its camel racing. It’s quite fascinating to watch as there are no jockeys – just a bunch of brave and skillful people to get the camels lined up and started and then the rest is up to the camels to gallop to the finish line. Watching ...

Portland, Oregon is definitely a rainy place as I discovered this weekend while attending the Net Impact conference but it is also known for its bookstores, micro breweries, bicycles and weirdness.  These last two items come together when Portland holds its annual naked bike race every summer. I went to ...

This year’s SAP TechEd held in the world’s capital of gaming – Las Vegas – got off to an aptly appropriate start with a keynote presentation from Dr. Jane McGonigal entitled “Gamification” explaining how inventing new work and business practices based around games that engage employees, customers and vendors in ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...