Building Competitive Advantage (SAP World Tour Keynote)

Here’s a recording of a World Tour keynote presentation (it happens to be from Belgrade, Serbia, but I did similar presentations in several different regions). It covers how companies can build competitive advantage through customer intimacy, product leadership, category renewal, and operational excellence, using examples from SAP’s customers. You can download the slides in either PowerPoint or pdf format.  Read More →

Are You in Denial About Governance, Risk, and Compliance?

In a previous post, I talked about the “illusory superiority” effect, and how it blinds people to the fact that, on average, it’s unlikely that they use data better than their competitors. Guess what? It turns out that it applies to governance, risk, and compliance, too. Here are some figures from another Economist Intelligence Unit Survey, “Ascending the Maturity Curve, Effective Management of Enterprise Risk and Compliance”: We can see... [Read More...]

SAP BusinessObjects Mobile BI Directions

Here’s a video from this years SAPPHIRE NOW in Madrid, featuring Mimi Speir, Steve Lucas, and Andrew Murray giving an overview of SAP BusinessObjects mobile directions: Highlights include: New SAP BusinessObjects experience mobile application, based on the Exploration Views functionality from the BusinessObjects innovation center, with demo data from Experience.SAP.com Easily take a mobile analysis and create a StreamWork activity for collaborative... [Read More...]

Sybase: Big Data Crisis is a Big Lie

Sybase (“an SAP Company”) recently published an analytics guide called “Intelligence for Everyone”. The first section called “The Big Lie about Big Data” includes the following: Why “big lie?” Because, as the article points with lots of historical examples, there’s always been a “crisis” in data storage, but as data volumes have risen technology has always evolved to deal with it, and that’s as true today as it has been in... [Read More...]

Big Leap Forward: Analytics Keynote at UK & Ireland SAP User Group Conference 2011

I was honored to speak at this years UK & Ireland SAP User Group Conference held in Birmingham, UK. The first main day saw great keynotes from the new SAP UK Managing Director, Steve Winter; Analyst Ray Wang; SAP’s CIO, Oliver Bussmann; and Olympic Sprinter Steve Cram. You can read a full review by Christoph Ziedler on SAP.info, and see the various videos on YouTube starting with the introduction by Alan Bowling, Chairman of UKISUG. I gave... [Read More...]

Survey: Everybody Uses Data Better Than Their Competitors?

Here’s a chart from a recent study by the Economist Intelligence Unit called “Big data: Harnessing a game-changing asset”, showing that only 9% of respondents believe that they use data worse than their competitors. Let’s face it, they’re probably in denial. It’s often called “Illusory Superiority” or the “Lake Wobegon Effect” (a radio show where “all the children are above average”), and it’s a real force in the analytics... [Read More...]