Most Annoying Business Words of the Year — Animated

Jonathan Becher recently posted the results of research conducted by Accountemps (“WHAT’S THE BUZZ? Survey Reveals Most Overused Workplace Terms”) where 150 senior executives from the nation’s 1000 largest companies were asked: “What is the most annoying or overused phrase or buzzword in the workplace today?” Just for fun, here are the results in a flash animation below (click on the words to see them “swoop”... [Read More...]

How to Easily Analyze Your Excel Data in the Cloud

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is the first analysis tool that I’ve seen that I can honestly say is intuitive enough to use without any training (see http://microfinance.sap.com to prove it to yourself). If you’d like to know more about the product, list of “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about SAP BusinessObjects Explorer” in a previous post. This post is about the http://explorer.ondemand.com web site that lets you easily upload any... [Read More...]

Interview with DecisionStats.com

Ajay Ohri of DecisionStats.com has a selection of interviews with people in the BI/analytics space, including James Taylor and John Fox, the creator of R Commander. Here’s an interview he did with me last week covering trends in predictive analytics, cloud computing, social network analysis, etc. Ajay- Describe your career in science from school to Senior Director in SAP to blogger/speaker. How do you think we can convince students of the benefits... [Read More...]

BI FAIL #2

Seth Grimes of Alta Plana gives us a great example of business intelligence failure this week on the site USAspending.gov. I wrote about this site and others in a post in July, Great Examples of US Government BI Transparency. Unfortunately, it turns out that it’s not so great, in that some of the data shown was completely false… (this is generally considered a reasonable baseline of things to avoid). Seth gave the example of the graphic on the... [Read More...]

SAP and The 2.0 Adoption Council

As part of my role helping evangelize the use of social media within SAP , I am a proud member of the 2.0 Adoption Council, a group devoted to creating and sharing best practices in Enterprise 2.0 adoption (see the “Web 2.0 in SAP” section of this site for more information about internal Web 2.0 deployments at SAP). As explained on the council website at www.20adoptioncouncil.com, the council members are: …a collection of managers in large... [Read More...]

How to Create and Deploy Effective Metrics

I’m trying to catch up on a big backlog of materials and documents and documents that I’ve found useful… Here’s an excellent best practices report from TDWI on “how to create and deploy effective metrics” (registration required). The introduction to the document explains the background: Performance metrics are a powerful tool of organizational change. The adage “What gets measured, gets done,” is true. Companies that define objectives,... [Read More...]

One KPI Is Never Enough to Manage… A Country?

This article in the International Herald Tribune (slowly becoming the “global edition of the New York Times”) gives an overview of why gross domestic product (GDP) is an inadequate measure of a country’s success. There are some interesting parallels with corporate KPIs and the use of profit as an indicator of corporate success: “The panel, chaired by two Nobel economists, Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University and Amartya Sen of Harvard... [Read More...]

BI FAIL #1

This is the start of a hopefully long series of BI FAILs, examples of dysfunctional behavior and problems gathered from conversations with companies implementing business intelligence projects. Certain details (may) have been changed to protect the guilty.  “We had just implemented a new dashboard system, using data from a corporate warehouse. One key performance indicator had been typically been shown on a standard chart with the y-axis varying... [Read More...]

Integrating SAP and Google Wave, And The Context-Based Future of Business User Applications

Now that the Google Wave “sandbox” environment is widely available (see Starting with Google Wave if you need more background information), we’re starting to see some great examples of integrations between Google Wave and SAP systems. DJ Adams’ great post on SDN shows how he built a robot to intercept SAP-specific references in a Google Wave conversation, and use that information to automatically augment the conversation. In this case, the... [Read More...]