Hot Topics
More than 100 companies have collaborated with the Conference Advisory Committee to create the Mastering Business Intelligence with SAP Program. These Hot Topics are addressed by a combination of local and internationals customers, BI thought leaders, SAP experts and partners - plus special pre-conference sessions, specific functionality discussions and workshops.
Click on the Hot Topics to expand the content.
User Adoption & Business Engagement
Engagement of users and managing expectations; dealing with cultural shifts and change; clarifying the business’ requests; managing differing levels of acceptance; exploiting the technology to achieve higher penetration; moving the business from alternative tools and encouraging ownership; lobbying key stakeholders; understanding why the business is reluctant to transition to BI; strategies to migrate from other systems; utilising the poweruser community more effectively; communication between IT and the business; streamlining away from manual work; developing project sponsors and champions; supporting the users; delivering business outcomes including how to design joint business and IT services; managing demand (change requests and support); working with the business to measure and set achievable KPIs
Team Structure for a BI Team and Attracting & Retaining Staff
Structure of the BI support organisation; what are the skill sets needed for supporting the new series of tools?; balance of specialist skills maintained in-house vs. outsourced; deciding which skills to invest in; comprehensive list of the skills that need to be considered; relationships with and the management of external consultants; cost vs. timeliness of delivery; minimising the loss of domain knowledge; closing the gap between IT and the business - aligning KPIs; helping the support team to be an internal ‘sales’ team; creating a case for a BI Competency Centre (BCC) and understanding
the ROI; build or buy skills?; deploying training programs
Information Presentation, Delivery & Deployment
Innovative ways of presenting and delivering information to the right users; how to get started with SAP BusinessObjects (BOBJ) - implementation methods, available tools and how they fi t into different environments; BI Explorer capabilities and scope; integration of BOBJ tools into source systems; best forms of report distribution and delivery; understanding the user experience; achieving a consistency in front-end presentation; improving the front-end presentation layer; leveraging the tools - Xcelsius, Webi, Web Application Designer and others; developing and building the user interface, tool selection and support; SAP Portal; dashboard development methodology; effectively communicating the data being measured; leveraging this enterprise suite of products in your existing SAP landscape
Visualisation & Analysis
Utilising BI to provide business value; leading edge “visualisation” techniques available in BI today; presenting the data in a way to aid the business in decision making - demonstrating its impact on the business; historical data reporting and future reporting perspectives; ensuring your goal is to make content useful and effective; intuitive reporting with visualisation and guided analytics; building effective visualisation standards for your deployment
Selection & Co-Existence of Alternative Tools in BI
What tools will work best with existing landscapes; what tools are available; guidelines for tool selection; SAP tools? BOBJ tools? Third party tools?; experiences in tool comparisons; evaluating the value each provide; obtaining and understanding requirements from the business; suggested path from SAP; co-existence of multiple toolsets; long term strategies to make sensible decisions; integrating non-SAP data; best approaches taken; user issues
Business Intelligence Strategy
Development of a BI strategy which is aligned with the business strategy; generating business value and gaining senior management buy-in; senior decision makers actively involved in projects; recommended techniques for securing funding; communicating the capabilities of BI; uncovering opportunities by picking the right target; basic building blocks and tools necessary to develop a framework to prioritise various BI initiatives; the effect of SAP’s current product landscape on reporting strategies; how should multiple BI tools (SAP and non-SAP) co-exist?; assessing your business/technical teams capabilities; translating strategy to implementation; understanding executive reporting requirements
Planning Tools
Understand and compare the budgeting, planning and forecasting tools now available; SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC); BI Integrated Planning; linking planning with corporate strategy; what additional skill sets will be required to support SAP BPC?; handling the transition to the new functionality; SAP’s roadmap for the development of the planning tools; SAP BPC vs. Integrated Planning; what is the implementation effort required?; maintaining a consistent user interface
Performance
Options and/or best practices for keeping a BI environment operating at an optimal level; controlling the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) ‘beast’; alignment between business (BI) strategy and performance management; BW Accelerator - real live experiences of what it can do and the benefi ts of using it - especially if these benefi ts can help to justify the cost; improving slow load times; improving availability of data; proactive performance management; using BI Statistics to analyse the problem areas
Enterprise Information Management
Data integrity; standard content; handling of unstructured data; trusting the data and data quality; reconciliation to source systems; non-SAP data integration; tools within BW to assist with data integration projects; the different issues that exist along the continuum of becoming a mature BW data warehouse; how to refl ect changes in your data structures; integrating businesses and fi nding synergies; merging data from multiple source systems with the least amount of complexity; data cleansing and data quality techniques; turning data into information; information governance; tool options for fi xing the data issues; how to integrate your structured and unstructured data
Upgrades & Implementations
Different strategies available for upgrading to BI7; real world experiences of what went wrong and issues that were encountered; basic approaches in getting a BW implementation successfully started through to the correct high level positioning for senior management
