Data Management

While successful Business Intelligence relies on good quality data that can be accessed quickly and easily - data management is a consistent challenge for many organisations. The most significant issues are establishing ownership and maintenance of the data. Getting the right information to make important strategic decisions is hugely dependent on the quality and integrity of your data.

• Knowing the business requirements for data
• Embedding information management into business practices
• Who has - or should have - control and ownership?
• Managing the change - creating a culture of ownership
• Forming processes to improve data quality
• The need for an archiving strategy
• SAP Masterdata Governance solution
• Tools and techniques to reconcile back to source systems
• Semi and unstructured data - analysis of social media and other unstructured data services, integrating with traditional data sources
• Strategies and tools within BW to assist with data integration projects
• Managing non SAP data in BW
• Introducing standards and compliance for master data and meta data input
• Considering SAP’s Data Integrator, Data Services and Metadata Manager tools
• Creating dedicated master data roles to assist data quality
• Strategies for dealing with large volumes of data
• What does SAP’s in-memory HANA technology have to offer in speeding up access to your data?

Developing a Business Intelligence Strategy

Being able to successfully plan a BI strategy months, or even years in advance is what many organisations are striving for. However, many companies work in ‘fire-fighting’ mode, dealing with strategic decisions as they arise. How can you move to a forward-thinking organisation? In addition, many organisations struggle with the development of a BI Strategy which is aligned with the business strategy - and gaining senior management buy-in to this strategy. Many are eager to understand how to develop a framework to prioritise the various BI initiatives with an organisation.

• Developing BI strategy - instilling a business-like approach towards IT tools and architecture
• A comprehensive approach and develop techniques to continually review your BI strategy
• Technology as an enabler - BI value is built upon technology but shouldn’t just be about the technology
• Understanding the benefits of a move to "operational" BI, moving away from purely analytical
• Measuring yourself against a maturity curve so that your organisation can track progress. How strategy, process, engagement vary based on where the organisation is at in level of BI maturity
• Getting management and end user buy-in to the strategy long term
• Including a roadmap for the development of BI technology, what reporting tool for what purpose
• Assessing your business and technical capabilities in Business Intelligence
• Translating strategy to implementation and what are the impacts on scoping, costing, business process, business engagement and training

Successfully Upgrading to BW 7.3

Many organisations are looking to upgrade to BW 7.3 - but there are numerous questions and concerns around making the change. People want to understand what they should take into consideration when planning the upgrade.

• Understanding the drivers - what are the real key BI issues that upgrading will solve?
• The importance of planning in any upgrade
• Do you have to switch off 7.2?
• What are the things to look out for?
• Compatibility issues - e.g. BPC 7.5 not being compatible with 7.3
• Can you just do a technical upgrade?
• Post upgrade - capturing the lessons and realising the business case
• Which reporting tools to choose?
• What are the data modelling improvements? Overcoming activation times, what is best practice?
• Understanding what resources and timelines are required for upgrades, migration and patches
• Achieving user acceptance of an upgrade
• Measuring the ROI and communicating the benefits of an upgrade to the business

BI Implementations & Migrations

From basic approaches in getting a BW implementation successfully started through to the correct high level positioning for senior management.

• Governance for BW Implementation
• Delivery of BI Projects
• Rolling out BI 4.0 with minimal impact to the business
• Global rollouts
• Managing the landscape - testing, support
• Keep your systems running during the upgrade
• Regression testing
• Different models of implementation - which is best?
• Solution Manager - what has happened to the methodology in Solution Manager
• Guided analytical approach
• Moving from other reporting tools to SAP BI
• Building a strategy for BI migration
• Developing a clear technical roadmap
• What's available in BW and what’s coming in BOBJ
• Who takes ownership of the success of BI?

Integrating BW with SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence 4.0

Increasingly, SAP BW customers are seeing the benefits of implementing BO tools. A seamless integration between BW and BO is the ideal, but how can this be achieved? The new release of BI/BO 4.x has raised many questions and a need for more information about how to integrate the new tools into existing systems

• Gaining an understanding of the functionality and features available in BI 4
• What are you trying to achieve? What are your business drivers?
• Which version of BI 4 should you implement? Should you jump in now or wait for further bug fixes? How to know when the solution is stable
• Appreciating the resources required. What are the costs in terms of manpower and time needed?
• Will you have to re-write all of your current reports or is there a way of migrating them?
• Proven successful change management strategies
• What will be in Feature Pack 3 for BI 4?
• SAP’s roadmap for support of current and previous versions. When will your version become obsolete?
• Transition to new tools - what is the optimal combination of the tools, what tools to use where and when?
• Direct integration with BW
• Can you still deliver everything through the portal?
• Webi - what changes are there?
• What will happen to BEx?
• Presentation layer - portal or BOBJ?

Taking BI Mobile

Mobile BI has become SAP BI customers’ biggest area of interest for 2012. Many executives are intrigued about the possibility of having access to reports on demand straight to their mobile device. But what are the practicalities of these applications? Applications which need to be both intuitive and effective.

• Defining the value and purpose of mobile BI in the workplace
• Understanding what SAP offers in the mobile space. How has the acquisition of Sybase affected this and what is the roadmap for the future?
• 3rd party tools that are available for making SAP BusinessObjects reports mobile e.g. RoamBI
• Assessing the security of your data on mobile devices. What solutions are out there to mitigate risks?
• Device decisions. How do you select the right device for your organisation? Considering speed, visualisation and detail. Which device can offer the greatest complexity? What are the differences in architecture requirements?
• How to deal with multiple mobile platforms
• What is available right now? What’s coming?
• Why and how is HANA relevant to mobility?
• How can this technology help to support a mobile workforce or sales representatives?

Information Access and Delivery

Organisations are looking for fast, efficient and innovative ways for users to access information and deliver reports using a variety of methods. What is best practice for accessing information and delivering reports? Is there best practice? The key is to understand the user experience and what is important to them when retrieving information.

• Should the user be accessing ERP or BI data?
• Presenting the data in a way to aid the business in decision making - demonstrating its impact on the business
• Enabling executives and business managers to obtain up-to-date information easily
• Effective styles of report presentation
• The importance of making front-end strategies part of the overall information strategy
• Leading edge “visualisation” techniques available in BI. E.g. Dashboards that are visually attractive, relevant and easy to use
• Best forms of report distribution - goal is to make content useful and effective
• Understanding the user experience and how they want their reports delivered
• Focusing on the recipient - can you have the same report for multiple audiences?
• SAP Portal - speed and tuning, customisations, BI related dependencies between BW, Portal, Solution Manager
• How is Sharepoint relevant? How can it benefit your BI environment
• Web reports
• BI Workspace
• BI Launchpad

In Memory

How can in-memory technologies enhance performance? Understanding SAP’s roadmap for HANA. Where are we heading? And how do we get there?

• When should companies consider HANA and why? Is it for extremely large companies only?
• What’s the roadmap for investing in BWA? What is the impact of HANA on BWA? What happens to current investment?
• Understanding the long term strategy and direction of SAP
• What’s the value? What are the potential advantages, how does it compare?
• Can you get rid of the data warehouse layer?
• Why and how is HANA relevant to mobility?
• HANA on BW
• Implementations version 1. and 1.5 - database changes and implementation scenarios
• Developing the business case for In-Memory
• Storage strategy

Planning Solutions

Organisations are looking to understand and compare the budgeting, planning and forecasting tools now available. What are the benefits of each? The learnings and pitfalls?

• What is the SAP roadmap for planning tools
• Understanding BPC and how it integrates with BW
• BPC case studies - particularly with respect to migration of IP
• Comparing the performance and benefits of different planning tools (BPC vs. IP)
• Enterprise planning vs. department planning
• Consolidations
• Integrated Planning - what are the support plans?
• Determining the implementation effort required
• Flexibility of the tools and what are other tools are available?

Security

Many organisations require high levels of security of their system. Security may be functional or referring to data or infrastructure. Employing security successfully can be quite complex.

• Case studies where companies have employed a rigorous security model
• Creating differential views and preferences for users
• Evaluating 3rd party tools for security. Matching the solution to your business situation
• Getting SAP roles to work with BW
• User expectations and views of security and data ownership

Improving User Adoption and Effectively Engaging the Business

The ideal situation is to have users actively using and owning the BI system - so what are some techniques to manage user expectations and how do you effectively engage the business?

• Clarifying the business requests - managing differing levels of acceptance and knowledge. Understanding their requirements
• Getting the business involved from the beginning. Perhaps seconding business people into the BI team…
• Once it’s built, how do you make them come? Concentrating on users actively employing and owning the BI system. Make someone successful and others will follow
• Exploiting the technology to achieve a higher penetration and acceptance. Helping them to use the system better
• Change Management - incorporating transition strategies to migrate from other systems to SAP BI
• Utilising the power user community more effectively for active engagement
• Lobbying key stakeholders
• Building a strong communication network between IT and the Business
• Training and educating the users. What works? What doesn’t? Building tailored training
• Energising the business appetite for innovation
• Using Excel to get attention and understanding - how to replicate what they do in Excel
• Self-service reporting - are there standards and templates?
• Managing expectations

BI Development Methods

There has been much discussion globally over whether the waterfall or agile development method is more effective and the debate remains strong.

• Ascertaining when agile development methods are appropriate
• Identifying the features of a successful agile project
• What resources are required for agile development as compared to using the waterfall method?
• How to properly project manage a piece of work undertaken using the agile development method

SAP Roadmap

Customers are very interested to hear about the current SAP Roadmap and what the immediate (and not so immediate) future holds. Integration is a big issue and people are keen to know what will continue to be supported and how the new tools integrate. BI 4.x is still raising questions and concerns. For example - what is happening to BEx? Organisations are looking for clear visibility of what is coming up.

Building a BI Capability in Your Organisation

Supporting Business Intelligence within your organisation with higher complexity and changing environments is an ongoing challenge. In addition you need to know the skills required, the best team structures and how to train your people.

• BI Team Structures that work. Employing people in the BI team who can relate to the business. Does this work in practice? Implications for communication, trust and requirements gathering
• How to keep the team together and energised. Coping with loss of knowledge when people move on
• What role do contractors play? What happens when they leave? Building knowledge management plans and how to minimise loss of IP
• Attracting and retaining the right people. What happens when you train and support and they leave anyway?
• Outsourcing vs. in house. What are the arguments for both? How to make the best decision for your environment
• Awareness of the skills in house - successfully seconding people from the business
• Building an innovative education and training plan which includes business knowledge not just technical training
• Keeping them engaged once you’ve built the team

Generating Business Value and Securing Management Buy-In

What are the recommended techniques to deal with funding issues and manage expectations of all stakeholders? BI Project teams need to be able to educate and communicate the capabilities and value of BI to Senior Management.

• Understanding what the Business wants, an example of BI that is driven by the Business
• CEO, high level presentation. What do they want? What do they think of BI? Panel of CIOs - tell us where we're going wrong, what information they want, where they want to see BI in the company
• Techniques which can be used to deal with funding issues - money is low and requirements are high, how to gain incremental funding and also funding of day to day activity
• Expectation management in a changing environment
• Prioritising the importance of BI
• Ensuring that senior decision makers are actively involved in BI projects
• Linking BI strategy to the business case
• Generating business value - how to determine value?
• Demonstrating ROI - helping to sell the technology
• Building an IT roadmap with vision to support the existing systems
• Getting quick wins to gain support
• Developing KPIs for reports with the Business

Predictive Analytics

Organisations often face issues with accurately forecasting demand and profitability, and identifying when a key metric is trending out of line. Predictive analytics can provide a valuable tool in key business decisions if it is undertaken successfully.

• Understanding the maturity required in your BI organisation to undertake predictive analytics
• What are the strategies and tools you can employ to achieve predictive analytics?
• Successful case studies where predictive analytics has taken place

Selection and Co-existence of Alternative Tools

There are now so many tools available it creates a high level of confusion for many customers. Which tool to choose and when? What tools will work best with our existing landscape? What are the best practice guidelines to tool selection? How do we compare?

• Knowing what tools are available and leveraging them
• How do I support which tools?
• Performance of each
• BOBJ tools vs. third party tools?
• Experiences in tool comparisons - how do you evaluate the value they can provide?
• Requirements from the business - what tools help the business in what way?
• SAP roadmap considerations - what is the suggested path from SAP
• Role of Crystal
• How do multiple toolsets coexist?
• Long term strategy to make sensible decisions
• Integrating non-SAP data
• What are the user issues?