Hot Topics
The depth and breadth of the content is a result of 6 months of careful research and development. SAP BusinessObjects Professionals from more than 100 organisations across Australia have collaborated with the SAP BusinessObjects Advisory Team in a series of Round Table Discussions to create this program around 20 Hot Topics.
Mobile BI
Mobile BI has become SAP BusinessObjects customers’ biggest area of interest for 2012. Executives, shop-floor professionals and customers alike are requesting reports on their mobile devices, which need to be both intuitive and effective.
- Defining the value 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 and Citrix
- Case studies where 3rd party tools have been employed successfully. Benefits and drawbacks
- 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?
- Delivering reports to employees vs. reports for customers in the public domain. What do you need to consider?
- Understanding the back-end development and architectural requirements for mobile solutions
- Integration points of mobile solutions with your internal systems
- What is the future of SAP’s support for Flash for iPads and iPhones?
Engaging and Training Users
Your tools are only as good as the people using them. Engaging business users is the first hurdle organisations face when embarking on an SAP BusinessObjects project. But ongoing training and education plays just as an important role in the success of your project.
- Identifying successful strategies for getting business users to value BI. Energising them to push for innovation in the area
- Selecting power users within your organisation to drive the uptake of reports in the business. Understanding what skills are required for the role
- How can employing dashboards improve the business uptake of reports?
- Best practices for interacting with users. Email vs. personal contact
- Employing business people in the BI team who can relate to people in the business. Does this work in practice? Implications for communication, trust and requirements gathering
- Successful strategies for dealing with knowledge loss when people leave the business. How to inspire the replacement employees
- Succession planning for super users when they leave. The role of documentation and standards for new super users
- Assessing centralised vs. decentralised report creation. What has worked and not worked for organisations? Considering duplication, waste and inconsistency of reports
- Motivating users to attend training courses for report creation
- Assessing different types of training. What works and what doesn’t!
- Dealing with the ‘post-honeymoon’ period after an implementation. How to maintain momentum and interest in the project
- The use of KPIs for user adoption. Can they help? What aspects should you measure?
Data Management
Successful Business Intelligence relies on good quality data that can be accessed quickly and easily. There are number of different solutions and techniques available to enhance data management and customer organisations are keen to understand what they are and how they can assist their company.
- Identifying processes to improve data quality. Strategies to change the culture amongst those who input the data
- Introducing standards and compliance for master data and meta data input
- Considering SAP’s Data Integrator, Data Services and Metadata Manager tools. What are they good for and what are their limitations?
- 3rd party tools to assist in data quality. What are they and what can they do?
- Monitoring data quality. How often, who and with what?
- What can creating dedicated master data roles do to assist in 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? What does ‘in-memory’ mean anyway? And what are the options for non-SAP customers?
- Managing unstructured data from social media
Upgrading Your System to BI 4.x
There has been a great deal of hype surrounding the new version of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4. Customers want to understand why they should upgrade and what they’re in for if they do.
- Understanding the significance of the jump from XI3 to BI 4. What is the different between the jump between XI3 to BI 4 and 6.5 to BI 4?
- Gaining an understanding of the new functionality and features available in BI 4
- Which version of BI 4 should you migrate to? Should you jump in now or wait for further bug fixes? How to know when the solution is stable
- Appreciating the resources required to undertake the upgrade. What are the costs in terms of manpower and time needed?
- When you upgrade, will you have to re-write all of your current reports or is there a way of migrating them?
- Proven successful change management strategies for the upgrade
- 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?
Universe Design
Being the cornerstone of the Business Objects semantic layer, the universe design becomes one of the most important aspects of getting the right data out there in time for analysis and decision making.
- An appreciation of the role of universes
- Identifying situations when you need to build a universe and situations where you don’t
- Cubes vs. universes vs. other approaches e.g. Microsoft SQL Server
- How will universes be different in BI 4?
- Assessing the security of universes. Why is it not multi-dimensional?
- Assessing the stability of universes, especially when they are linked
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
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 rock-solid security model
- Creating differential views and preferences for users
- Evaluating 3rd party tools for security. Matching the solution to your business situation
Report and Data Governance
Governance in technical systems is often a double-edged sword. Giving users full control over reports can wreak havoc with duplication and inconsistency throughout the business. However, a centralised system can often lead to user disengagement and increased work load for the IT and BI teams.
- Who should create the data, who should use it, where is it stored and who understands it?
- Creating templates for standard reports. Can this work? Case studies where it has
- Consolidating duplicate reports and controlling them for the future
- In-system visibility of data loading logic vs. in-system hiding of data loading logic
- Creating organisational processes and structures to ascertain who answers questions around data, reports and the system
- Creating ‘business rules’ around information management and storing them centrally so that they can be visible and reused
SAP’s Roadmap
By understanding SAP’s roadmap for BusinessObjects tools, upgrades and new products, organisations are able to make solid plans on the direction of their systems for the future.
- Understanding the upgrade path. What functionality will be available and when?
- Identifying the current tools and matching them to your business requirements
- How long will SAP BusinessObjects tools be supporting HTML5? What about Adobe Flash?
- Gaining and appreciation of SAP’s direction in terms of technology
Developing a BI Strategy for Your Organisation
Planning a BI strategy months, or even years in advance is a sign of a mature BI organisation. However, many companies work in ‘fire-fighting’ mode, dealing with strategic decisions as they arise. How can you move to a forward-thinking organisation?
- Instilling a business-like approach towards IT tools and architecture. What companies have been successful at this?
- Obtaining business user and management’s support for long-term thinking
- Creating strategies to deal with users’ reactions
- Identifying a BI model of maturity relating to strategy, process and engagement
- Creating a maturity curve so that your organisation can track your progres
Gathering Business Requirements
To fully leverage the power of SAP BusinessObjects tools for the business, communication between the IT department and the business is crucial. Properly gathering, documenting and then delivering on business requirements is essential.
- Dealing with business requirements that keep changing. What strategies can you employ to deal with this?
- Using regulations, standards and templates to define business requirements properly. Can they work in practice?
- Identifying the difference between what the business ‘wants’ and what the business ‘needs’
- How to weight requirements where there may be different priorities for different areas of the business
- Using prototyping to assist in visualisation for users. What tools are available to achieve this and what are the benefits and drawbacks?
Getting Your BI Team Structure Right
The makeup of your BI team can be the make or break of your BI projects. Getting the right people undertaking the right tasks is a recipe for success.
- What is the right balance of technical and business experts in the team?
- Assessing how many people you really require in your team
- Creating a BICC. What are the benefits, what kinds of businesses is it suited to and how do you go about creating one?
- Assessing the role that contractors can play in your BI team. What kinds of roles are best suited to using them? Best practices for managing them
- Strategies to keep your team together and moving towards the same goals and aims
Agile BI Development
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?
Harnessing the Web Intelligence Tool
SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence provides an intuitive interface that allows business analysts and non-technical information consumers to ask spontaneous and iterative business questions of their data using everyday business terms.
- Webi vs. Crystal Reports vs. Excel. What are the different features and when should you use them?
- A roadmap for the Webi tool. What new features are coming in future releases, especially with regards to charting and commentary?
- Creating templates in Webi. Is it possible?
- Using Webi as an ETL tool
Geospatial Reporting
Many people are looking to increase the functionality of their reports with the inclusion of spatial information. Closely related to the advent of mobile SAP BusinessObjects, this is a next generation solution that can advance the use of SAP BusinessObjects in the business.
- Use case examples where the inclusion of spatial information could improve reports e.g. property and asset management
- What are SAP’s offerings or future offerings in the area?
- 3rd party tools that integrate with SAP BusinessObjects. What are their merits and drawbacks?
- Integrating SAP BusinessObjects with ESRI, Google Maps and MapInfo
- Mobile capture of spatial information. How do you deal with the exceptions?
Securing Management Buy-In
Upper management’s support of a BI project is imperative if it is to succeed. Not only do you require their support to get the project over the line from the outset, but continuous sponsorship throughout, and even after the project is a recipe for success.
- Getting management to realise the value of BI. Creating a business case for your projects that will resonate with top tier managers
- Obtaining recognition from management of the workload that new projects and new reports require to complete
Planning Solutions
SAP BusinessObjects’ BPC tool combines planning, budgeting, and forecasting capabilities with management and legal consolidation functionality. Organisations want to know what BPC has to offer them as well as considering alternative solutions.
- Understanding what BPC is, the nuts and bolts. What do you get and what do you not get?
- Where is BPC heading? SAP’s roadmap for planning tools
- Considering other planning tools and making a comparison of their capabilities
Report Management
Without a proper report management system, organisations can end up with lost reports, duplicate reports or superfluous reports in the system.
- How to put together an archiving strategy that really works!
- Understanding how Crystal Reports archive
- Managing a large number of recurring reports. Can you use email addresses to locate repeats?
- Managing the scheduling of reports. How to understand what reports are used when and which reports use what universes and objects
- SAP and 3rd party tools to help with the distribution of reports
- Content version control with Lifecycle Manager. How do you get it, what does it do and what does it not do?
Real-Time BI
With real-time BI, organisations can see what is happening to their businesses with up to the minute in information trending over a certain amount of time. This can be applied to a number of business scenarios and can assist in making organisations react to business changes as they happen.
- What business scenarios do real-time reports best suit? What business units can reap the most benefit?
- The role of databases in real-time BI. What technology to do you need to enable it?
- How can SAP HANA assist in real-time analytics?
- The use of real-time dashboards in business. Case studies where benefits have been achieved
SAP Solution Manager for BusinessObjects
The SAP Solution Manager application management solution facilitates technical support for distributed systems - with functionality that covers all key aspects of solution deployment, operation, and continuous improvement. How can this tool be leveraged for SAP BusinessObjects customers?
- Solution Manger 101. What is it and what is it for?
- Solution Manager is more than a monitoring tool. What else can it do?
- Case studies where companies are successfully using the Solution Manager tool
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