YOUR CONTENT

The content areas for Mastering Business Intelligence with SAP will be uploaded July 2010.

More than 120 Australian and New Zealand organisations will participate in in-depth research to identify the content areas for next year's program. If you would like to contribute to creating the program by being part of the research please email Steve Morris or contact Steve on:

mobile: +61 403 809 312
landline: +61 2 9955 7400

In the meantime, please take a look at the content areas that our most recent Mastering Business Intelligence with SAP (October 2009) program addressed.

Business Intelligence Strategy

Development of a BI Strategy which is aligned with the business strategy; generating business value and gaining senior management buy-in; basic building blocks and tools necessary to develop a framework to prioritise various BI initiatives; creating a roadmap for the development of BI technology; the affect of SAP’s current product landscape on reporting strategies; how should multiple BI tools (SAP and non SAP) coexist?; assessing your business/technical teams capabilities; translating strategy to implementation and what are the impacts on scoping, costing, business process, business engagement and training

User Adoption and Organisational Change Management

Engagement of users; managing user expectations; clarifying the business requests; accelerating BI performance; concentrating on users actively employing and owning the BI system; exploiting the technology to achieve a higher penetration; transition strategies to migrate from other systems to SAP BI; utilising the power user community more effectively; communication between IT and the Business

BI Competency Centres

Knowledge acquisition - do you build or buy skills?; what capabilities are needed - technical and post go-live support, management and analysis; measuring ROI; non-SAP skills required in a BICC and/or external data sources; managing Organisational Change Management; understanding the impacts on business and IT

Team Structure for a BI Team and Attracting and Retaining Staff

Challenges in how to maintain the skill sets for supporting the new series of toolsets; balance of specialist skills maintained in house vs. outsourced and the relationships with external consultants; deciding which skills to invest in; comprehensive list of 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

Information Presentation, Delivery and Deployment

Innovative ways of presenting and delivering information to the right users; effective styles of report presentation; printing vs. online analysis; best forms of report distribution; understanding the user experience; achieving a consistency in front end presentation; effective processes for managing “commentary”; improving the front end presentation layer; leveraging the tools - Pioneer, Crystal, Xcelsius, Webi, Web Application Designer, Visual Composer and others; focusing on the recipient - can you have the same report for multiple audiences?; graphs vs. tables; developing and building the user interface

Visualisation and 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

Performance Optimisation Applications

Understand and compare the budgeting, planning and forecasting tools now available; SAP Business Planning and Consolidation; 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

Performance

Options and/or best practices for keeping a BI environment operating at an optimal level; alignment between business (BI) strategy and performance management; BW Accelerator - real live experiences of what it can do and the benefits of using it - especially if these benefits can help to justify the cost; impact on volumes

Enterprise Information Management

Data governance; 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; managing non SAP data in BW; different issues exist along the continuum of becoming a mature BW data warehouse; the issues in the management of delta, batch and real-time access methods

Upgrades to BI7

Managing expectations; implementing a successful change management program; the challenge of finding experienced and knowledgeable BI resources; different strategies available for approaching an upgrade to BI7 - the benefits and risks associated with each; steps involved in a successful BI7 upgrade and what the costs are to the business; examining the technical dependencies that need to be considered in an upgrade

New BI Implementations

From basic approaches in getting a BW implementation successfully started through to the correct high level positioning for senior management; lessons that new BI customers can learn from existing BI customers; approaches to resourcing and skills - realistic expectations; impacts on organisational structures; understanding the various system architecture options that need to be considered