You’ll probably want to put it into full screen mode to appreciate the demos…

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Courtesy of London Business School, here’s a great presentation by Bernard Liautaud, founder and eighteen-year CEO of BusinessObjects, explaining how he and his team created the first “European silicon valley startup”, growing the company from zero to a billion dollars in revenue, and then selling to SAP for $6.7bn. Bernard is now a General Partner of Balderton Capital, one of the largest venture capital funds in Europe.

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The SAP BusinessObjects Social Network Analyzer came out last year, combining business intelligence with relationship data to create a “social intelligence” solution. It’s a prototype from the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center. It can combine information from HR systems, CRM systems, project databases, committee attendee lists, distribution lists, and any other other system that contains relationships between people.

The new version will be available to download soon. In the meantime, you can try it online at http://sna-demo.demand.com. It features more functionality, an updated user interface, and a fully-developed administration console that gives fine-grained management control over the system.

We’re taking a Web 2.0 approach to innovation – sharing these prototypes so we can make them better. So please give the Innovation Center your feedback.

Find the Right People

We’ve heard a lot about the collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 platforms. But how can you find the people you’d like to work and collaborate with?

The Social Network Analyzer lets you search on attributes, or browse through the left-hand menu, which gives you easy access to all the information available about people using faceted navigation. When you click on a name, you see all the information about them in the right-hand window.

The new version now lets you choose multiple filters, and administrators can easily customize the attributes available for any individual.

Create and Collaborate with Ad-Hoc Groups

You can drag and drop the people you want to work into the clip area, which is now at the top of the interface. More collaboration options are now available, including the ability to automatically create a 12Sprints activity.

Find Commonalities

The new version features tag clouds that show what attributes a chosen group of people have in common.

Share Views

Once you’ve navigated to a particular view, you can now save it and send it to others as a URL (similar to the functionality used by Google Maps and other applications)

Explore Relationships

The relationships available for a person have been more explicit. And the relationships now have history – you can show the state of the network at a particular point in time. For example, after acquiring another company, you could analyze how well the two company networks integrate over time.

Closest Relationship

You can determine the shortest connection path between you and another individual, across all relationships.

Manage Personal Information

The new version makes it easy to add other information that you’d like to make available to colleagues, such as your personal email address, web site, twitter account, etc.

Customize Security and Privacy

Employees may not want to make available to everybody, so there’s fine-grained security over who can see what information.

Manage information relationships

The prototype allows people to add their own personal, information relationships – these are only visible to the people concerned (note that this functionality is not enabled on the http://sna-demo.ondemand.com platform, but is in the downloadable version)

Connection history

Users can see the full set of relationships that have been created (note that this functionality is not enabled on the sna-demo.ondemand.com platform)

Socially-Augmented Applications

Some other prototypes extend the social intelligence functionality into other applications, such as this Social intelligence plugin for Microsoft Outlook. As you click on an email, the profiles of the people on the “to” or “cc” list are automatically shown.

And there’s now a free mobile social intelligence iPhone application called “People Finder” available that lets you easily and quickly find the people you need to communicate with.

Drinking our Own Champagne

The social network analyzer has been rolled out to all 50,000 employees, and is used many thousands of times each week.

A Product for Grown Ups

The new version has a full administration interface, to bring in information from multiple sources, set up the entities that are to be shown for each user, etc.

High-Level Architecture

Here’s the high-level architecture of the solution, showing how you can bring information from multiple different sources, and consume it in a wide range of SAP and non-SAP applications.

API based on OpenSocial

The clients communicate with the central relationship server using an API based on OpenSocial – but extended to include multiple levels of relationship. For more information, please see this Enterprise OpenSocial whitepaper.

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SAP’s decision-focused collaboration project, 12sprints, is now in “open beta”, so that anybody can sign up. Here’s the blurb from the web site explaining what it is:

Bring order to chaos and transform teamwork into results quickly. Collaborative decision-making brings together:

• People - Get everyone on the same page
• Information - Share documents and data all in plain view
• Methods - Provide structure with business tools for brainstorming, strategizing, and decision-making

And it’s built for speed - use for free and be up and running in minutes!  Learn more

This post gives an introduction to what you can do with the technology, and points you to some useful links. First, here’s a video that explains some of the basics, and you can find a full set of Tutorial Videos on the 12Sprints YouTube Channel.

When you log in, you’ll see a screen like this one:

Once you’ve signed up you can start to create activities. In order to show you a glimpse of some of the things you can do, lets look at a couple of examples.

A “First Introduction to 12Sprints” Activity

Here’s an example Activity I put together to illustrate the concepts and tools available in 12Sprints. Each “activity” is broken down into sections, or “activity tools” chosen from a large catalog of possibilities. In this example, I’ve pulled in a selection of these tools to explain the overall layout of a typical decision (in this case, I chose to discuss a high-level comparison of 12Sprints and other collaborative environments).

Here’s an overview of the activity, and then we’ll look at each section in turn:

The first block in the example is an introduction to the activity, to explain to new participants what the Activity is about, where to get more information, etc. Participants can make comments on any section, and add links to other resources to back up their arguments. Note also the feedback tab on the right-hand side – this opens a full forum designed to streamline user feedback about the prototype, powered by UserVoice.

12Sprints is focused on decision-making, so let’s start by explaining the decision we’d like to make:

Let’s add an example of one of the most basic decision-making tools – a comparison table. Note that we can change from a “list view” to a “single item” view in order to see all the information without scrolling.

Here’s another simple decision tool – a pro/con table. Participants can add their own pro/con comments. I can see the information as a simple table, and mouse-over to see the details:

Or I can expand the table to see the full set of information:

You can group several related activities into a single high-level section:

Finally, here’s another simple tool, asking people to give their reactions to the decision and the process (positive/neutral/negative):

Throughout this process, you can make comments, upload documents, add invite/manage participants using the menu at the top of the screen. There’s also the ability to add and track action items for basic “decision workflow”

Here are some of the other tools you can currently add – the goal is to extend these over time.

A “Real” 12Sprints Example

I wanted to get a feel for what it would be like to use 12Sprints in a real situation, so I applied it to a life decision of my own: whether or not I should vaccinate my daughter against the H1N1 flu virus (the “swine flu”). I was pretty sure it was the right thing to do, but I knew others disagreed, so I wanted to understand their point of view, and see if that would sway my decision. Here’s the full activity, as an image:

Conclusion

I didn’t change my mind about vaccinating my daughter – but the process certainly opened my eyes to aspects of the decision-making process that I had not taken into account, and I ended up with a much better understanding of why others might disagree. I believe that this aspect – making sure that all relevant angles are being taken account of when making a decision – will prove extremely useful in real-life implementations.

Other links

• Chris Kanaracus, SAP’s Enterprise Collaboration Tool Entering Public Beta
• Clint Boulton, eWeek, SAP Offers 12Sprints As Enterprise Alternative to Google Wave

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You can download a pdf version here and the full PowerPoint file, including the Xcelsius dashboards here.

Update: You can see a screencam recording of this presentation here.

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January saw Obama’s inauguration, and a reflection on Bush’s analytic legacy, a discussion on whether “gut feelings” have any basis in science, a dashboard showing the best companies to work for in the US, and a quick demonstration that Malcom Gladwell was right.

February’s posts discussed the power of having the right data, and that dashboards have been around for a long, long time, but if they have poor data it’s like putting lipstick on a pig, and that it would be a crime not to include analytics in applications — but also that we’re all really bad at making decisions.

March’s posts were about BI in Bahrain, Brussels, and on the Bosphorus, making tough decisions, BI incompetency centers, scandalous bankers making more money having a shower than the rest of us make in a year, the wonderful Innovation Center and Social Network Analyzer, and more problems with bad data.

April’s posts covered more news on the Social Network Analyzer, the importance of taking account risk in business intelligence, and how BusinessObjects users think they know everything.

May included a trip to Australia with presentations on why BI projects fail and what to do about it, BI competency centers, and transforming BI; the launch of Wolfram Alpha and the inevitable problem of semantics, the launch of BusinessObjects Explorer and a not-for-profit analytics example.

June saw posts on everything you ever wanted to know about Explorer, BI market shares, Gartner and collaborative decision-making, dispenser analytics, the end of LucidEra, and the start of Recovery Act analytics.

July saw some more great examples of government BI transparency, a fun opportunity to test your decision-making skills, predictions about the end of relational databases and augmented BI reality.

August saw presentations in Belgium and South Africa, the launch of SAP’s sustainability dashboards, and a discussion of whether anybody cares about BI market share.

September’s posts included the first BI Fails and BI Briefs, including my opinions on BI futures, why it’s important to have more than one KPI, and the most annoying business words of the year.

October’s posts included how to incorporate live twitter into PowerPoint using Xcelsius, the problems of manual analysis and justice, and highlights of SAP TechEd in Vienna.

November’s posts included how to use Twitter to surf through traffic, the death of OLAP, and tracking baby’s KPIs

December saw Explorer for the iphone, the release of a new version of Xcelsius, some Season’s Greetings showing off the new features, and a great roundup of posts for the year.

Thank you for reading, and I look forward to 2010!

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Here is a season’s greetings dashboard that shows off some of the latest features of Xcelsius 2008 SP3. Tweet the color you’d like to see in the garland. The dashboard updates every 30 seconds. How long Twitter search takes to recognize the tweet can be pretty variable – but most of the time, it’s less than a minute.

How it works:

1. I set up an Excel XML Connection that grabs a feed from Twitter using the search term “#twitterlights”.
2. The top three (most recent) tweets are parsed to identify the color, using a vlookup table of the first three characters (if no color is found, it defaults to red / lime / yellow)
3. The SAP greetings card images are shown using the Slideshow component
4. The buttons launch a browser window, using an URL that automatically presets a Twitter status update, ready to be tweeted (starting the tweet with @votebytweet means that followers don’t see it by default, but you can leave it out if you want, and you can use the rest of the tweet to tell people how awesome/useless this demo is… :-))
5. I use two timers, to cycle the colors around the image and to change the slides. I wracked my brain for ages trying to do this, but then realized there was an easy and elegant method using the history component. You simply chose an input cell and single output cell, then put a formula in the “input cell” such as “=output cell+1”, and set the timer. Every interval, the contents of “input cell” are put into “output cell”, so the contents of input_cell will tick up by one every period.

Here’s a copy of the XLF file if you’d like to see how it works. Have fun!

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Wikipedia on Sex in Advertising

Top 10 Things You Should Never Discuss Online

Finally, no, I don’t know who did the video (it wasn’t me!), or whether it’s “official” or not…

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Here’s a summary of some of the new things in the latest version of Xcelsius 2008. I’ve borrowed liberally from the official documentation that you can download, along with the program, here.

New Components

Sparkline chart components. The new Sparkline chart is based on the Sparkline chart created by Edward Tufte and provides a method for displaying a one-dimensional range of numeric data in a way that is dense, takes up a small space, and can be quickly interpreted. It is useful for creating small, data-intense graphs to show trends and variations associated with a specific measurement, such as stock market activity.

Designers can set key data points (start value, end value, low value, and high value) that will be displayed as markers on the Sparkline chart. They can also define a normal range that will be displayed as a colored background behind the chart.

Bullet chart components. Two new charts Horizontal Bullet Chart and Vertical Bullet Chart components are available, similar to those designed by Stephen Few.

The Bullet Chart components have a single primary measure (for example, current year-to-date revenue) that is displayed as a vertical or horizontal bar.A marker indicates a target or performance goal and changing color hues behind the bar indicate qualitative ranges of performance (for example: poor, satisfactory, and good).

Designers can configure the Bullet Chart to display multiple series and can configure the scale, axis, and ticks separately for each series. For example, the chart can be configured to show revenue in thousands of dollars, profit in dollars, and order size as a count.

Scorecard Selector component. A new selector component is available that allows you to display visual alerts in a grid. At runtime, users can click column headings to sort the grid on the column’s data.

The new Scorecard selector component is similar to the List View selector component, but includes options to enable and configure alerts in columns and to add headers that allow users to sort the columns at runtime. Alert levels can be displayed with cell background colors, font colors, or alert icons with or without values.

Canvas container component. A new container component is available for creating an invisible container. The new Canvas container component is similar to the Panel container component, but it does not have any art (for example, background, borders, heading bar, and so on.)

In design mode, the container is visible to allow the designer to work with the component, but when the model runs, the container is invisible so components in the container appear to be free floating. If the components in the Canvas container extend beyond the container borders, scrollbars are added.

Push Button component. A new selector component allows users to restore Single Value components to their default values without resetting the values for the entire model.

The new Push Button component can be configured to set the values of one or multiple cells to specific values when the button is pushed. The values change only when the user pushes the button, so users have more control over when the data is copied to the destination cells.

SWF Loader component. A new web connectivity component is available for loading SWF files at run-time. The SWF Loader component is similar to the Slide Show component, but it is simpler and has better memory management. The new SWF Loader enables you to load both Xcelsius and non-Xcelsius SWF files at run-time. Unlike the Slide Show component, it does not provide transition effects when moving from one file to another and it does not allow you to block user interaction.

It does have some advanced options that I believe offer the opportunity to load more sophisticated SWF files and have them interact with the model.

New Features

Chart data labels. A new option is available to overlay data labels on or around chart markers. The Properties panel for chart components now includes a Data Labels option on the Appearance > Text tab. When selected, data labels are visible for the chart markers. If designers don’t want labels to display for some series, they can expand the Data Labels list and deselect the series.

Designers can specify the values used for the labels, the label position, and, if applicable, add leader lines. The options available for configuring the labels depends on the type of chart.

Chart range slider. For many chart components, you can now add a range slider to allow users to focus on a particular data set rather than viewing the entire chart at once. When the Enable Range Slider option is selected on the chart properties panel, on the Behavior > Common tab, designers can specify the beginning and end range for the slider and set the range labels.

At runtime, the range slider appears below or to the left (for bar charts) of the chart and allows users to select the data range that is shown in the chart. Users can change the size of the range by adjusting control handles on either side of the range slider.

The Enable Range Slider option is available for the following charts:

• Line
• Stacked bar
• Column
• Stacked column
• Candlestick
• Combination
• OHLC
• Area
• Stacked Area

Chart sorting. A new Enable Sorting option on the chart properties panels (Behavior > Common) allows designers to sort the chart data by data values or category labels and for a single series or multiple series. (see graphic in previous section)

When designers select the Enable Sorting option on the chart “Properties” panel, they can choose to sort the chart by data or by category labels. If the chart contains multiple series of data and sort by data is selected, the designer can also specify which series the data will sort on.

The Enable Sorting option is available for the following charts:

• Line
• Pie
• Column
• Stacked column
• Bar
• Stacked bar
• Combination
• Area
• Stacked area
• Radar
• Filled radar

Show/hide series at runtime. A new chart property, Enable Hide/Show Chart Series at Run-Time, is available when legends are enabled. When the property is selected, users can select which series are shown in the chart.

On the Appearance > Layout tab, when Enable Legend is selected, designers can select the Enable Hide/Show Chart Series at Run-Time option. If selected, at run-time, users can deselect checkboxes or click the series name in the legend to remove the series from the chart display.

Runtime:

The Enable Hide/Show Chart Series at Run-Time option is available for the following charts:

• Line
• Column
• Stacked column
• Bar
• Stacked bar
• Combination
• Area
• Stacked area
• Radar
• Filled radar
• Bubble
• XY
• Tree Map

Dynamically set color. You can now bind color values to cells in the spreadsheet to dynamically control colors of component elements. For all component elements, the “Color” selector dialog box includes a new Bind to a Color option. This option allows you to select a cell in the spreadsheet as the color value. The color for that element will reflect the value in the selected cell. The cell could then be linked to another component or external data source to dynamically set the color value at run-time. When a color is bound to the spreadsheet, the Color Selector icon on the Color tab is replaced by a new Bind icon.

The following color formats are supported:

• Hexadecimal (For example, FFFFFF, #FFFFFF, 0xFFFFFF (not case sensitive))
• RGB (For example, (255,255,255))
• VGA color names (For example, aqua, blue, black, fuchsia, and so on (not case sensitive))
• Decimal color equivalent (For example, FF00FF becomes 16711935)

If the specified cell is blank or contains an invalid value, the element color is set to black.

Load default scenario. The Local Scenario button component now allows users to create and load a default scenario. The new default scenario option allows users to set the model to a specific state when the SWF loads. When designers include the Local Scenario button component in models, at runtime, users can click the button to define and save a scenario. They can then click the Set Default option to load that scenario by default. The next time the model is opened, it automatically loads the specified scenario.

Note: Default scenarios are valid only for the local scenarios on the computer where they are defined (that is, the local computer).

Gauges support multiple indicators. Designers can now configure gauges to display multiple indicators, as well as set the indicator type to be a needle, outside marker, or inside marker.

When designers bind a gauge to multiple spreadsheet cells, the gauge displays an indicator for each cell. The designer can then configure the indicator type, label, and label position for each indicator. Note: When a gauge has multiple indicators, it is an output component only. The Enable Interaction option is not available on Behavior > Common tab, and users cannot manipulate the gauge values at runtime.

Forecasting. The Trend Analyzer component can now be configured to forecast data for a specific time period based on the trend found in existing data. Designers can bind the Trend Analyser component to a range that includes the historical data plus empty cells for the forecast data. At runtime, the Trend Analyzer inserts the trend data and forecast data into the specified cells.

Designers can also specify the number of forecast periods the Trend Analyzer will forecast. To set the number of forecast periods dynamically, designers can bind the Number of Forecast Periods box to a spreadsheet cell and, then bind a dial to the same cell. At runtime, users can manipulate the dial to set the number of forecast periods.

Selectors allow multiple insertions. Many selectors can now be configured to insert multiple chunks of data from different sources into multiple destinations at once.

On the selector “Properties” panel, in the General view, a new Data Insertion list box is available. By default, the list box contains one insertion behavior. Designers can click the Plus icon to add more insertion behaviors. The designer then selects each insertion behavior and specifies its Name, Insertion Type, Source Data, and Destination. At runtime, when users use the selector, the source data values for all the defined insertion behaviors are written to their specified destinations.,

The following selectors do not support multiple insertions: Play Selector, Toggle Button, Push Button, Icon, or Accordion Menu components.

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The sessions featured interaction with Twitter very heavily, using the #sapsummit hashtag. One of the interesting opportunities in this area is sentiment analysis on top of tweets, using SAP BusinessObjects Text Analytics – here’s a taste of what that could look like (demo data).

You can read more about the Summit, and how it compared to “Le Web” here.

Resources

• The PowerPoint twitter tools based on SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius allow you to see live tweets embedded in your presentation, and let you “auto tweet” out your key points.

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