On a recent visit to a metal manufacturing company in Oman, the I.T. Manager was discussing how he wants to use their InfoBurst and BusinessObjects applications for more operational reporting because of the huge success they have been seeing in this area recently. A few years ago they had built ...
Read More »Doing More with Less: BI Lessons from Lebanon
The Ancient inhabitants of Lebanon, the Phoenicians, were known for their trade and commerce and the modern Lebanese continue to be very astute in business. Despite the country being ravished by wars in the last few decades, the Lebanese have rebuilt and recreated their economy. They take both an optimistic ...
Read More »Is SAP Out of Sync with its BusinessObjects Customers?
This is a question I asked at the Town Hall session at the recent SAP Analytics and BusinessObjects Conference held in Ft. Worth, Texas. I qualified the question by stating that everything that SAP was promoting in their keynotes and on their booth were their Analytics tools namely Lumira, Predictive ...
Read More »Go Forth and Webify the World!
I was recently asked if I would write the foreword for the SAP Press book, Web Intelligence 3rd Edition BI 4.1 SP3. It made me think about my experience with BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence and how far the product has come so I thought I would share it. I definitely ...
Read More »Lady Gaga and IBIS 2014 – It’s all about Community
I went to see Lady Gaga in concert last week and it was quite a show. Non-stop energy, entertainment, excitement and some pretty amazing costumes. Gaga also likes to talk between songs and she spoke a lot about community. She shared how her community had helped her through some hard ...
Read More »SAP Sticks its Head in the Cloud for ERP and its Head in the Sand for BI
The messaging from SAP at this year’s Sapphire and ASUG Annual Conference was remarkable, radical and actually quite refreshing. If we are to take Bill McDermott (CEO) at his word, organizations (including SAP) need to eliminate layers of management, stop attending meetings and simplify business processes. The mantra of the ...
Read More »Bring Your Ailing Dashboards to the Dashboard Doctors at IBIS 2014
Growing up, I had always wanted to be a doctor but somehow I ended up in the world of computer software. I found I had a natural ability for troubleshooting customer problems and I worked for several years in customer technical support . I distinctly remember one customer telling me ...
Read More »Agile BI Needs Agile Education
Jim Roan, an American businessman, writer and motivational speaker once said: “If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.” With more organizations adopting agile methodologies to develop all their applications, including their BI ...
Read More »Mico Brings Data Viz Offerings to IBIS 2014
Mico Yuk, Author of Data Visualization for Dummies and Founder of the BIDashboardFormula.com has become the latest addition to what is shaping up to be a BusinessObjects Dashboard and Data Visualization Lollapalooza1 at IBIS 2014. Mico will be leading a half-day, interactive hands-on workshop at the pre-seminar on Sunday afternoon ...
Read More »Things That Sound Alike Are Not Always the Same
I was about to start my second presentation of the day at a joint ASUG/BusinessObjects User Group meeting this week, when one of the attendees beckoned me over. She told me that I sounded just like the actor Anthony Hopkins when I spoke. I explained that we both had similar ...
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