The company that gave us HANA is at it again with a pair of new business intelligence product offerings that could reshape how business data is analyzed. Over the last few years SAP showed us what could be analyzed (millions of rows of big data) and when it could be analyzed (at speeds measured in seconds and milliseconds).
Read moreWith product support for earlier versions of SAP BusinessObjects ending on December 31, 2015, many organizations are upgrading to the latest version, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BO BI) platform 4.1. As part of any BI upgrade plan, project managers should budget and schedule training for both end users and the IT personnel who support the BI system. With the Bi 4.1 upgrade in particular, it’s important that key personnel receive classroom training for the Information Design Tool.
Read moreBusiness Intelligence (BI), as we know it today, is an industry that’s been on a wild ride for the last 25 years. It has evolved from the basic idea of a top-down methodology to store data and provide the means for better decision making to full-scale, enterprise-wide, mission-critical systems used by every corporation in the world. BI and its older brother, Data Warehouse (DW), have become necessary components for doing business in the 21st century.
Read moreListening to customers and then developing tools that perfectly solve their business problems may seem like common sense for BI software makers, but it hasn’t always been the case. In the not-so-distant past, new releases were based purely on mysterious in-house choices made by product development teams. The new features added were mostly what they perceived to be the needs of users or were requested by a single deep-pocketed customer. New releases always came with some new functionality, but they also left customers craving more. The product development team just didn’t know it. There has always been a major disconnect between users and the vendor’s software development team. Thankfully, that model is changing.
Read moreHigh on the list of challenges for any data visualization project is the need to show results that clearly communicate information and help users identify areas for improvement. Without providing the information for business leaders to act on findings and “steer the ship to safer waters,” Business intelligence (BI) projects are nothing more than interesting, and far from essential. If you’re a BI developer, like me, you’d probably much rather be considered essential than plain old “interesting.” It’s that simple. But it can also be quite complicated with all of the moving parts and team members required in each stage of a data warehouse, not to mention all of the choices available to developers.
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