What I Found Interesting About Gartner BI Summit 2012 London
As always, it was a huge pleasure to catch up with customers, colleagues, analysts, partners, and competitors at one of Europe’s largest BI conferences. It was a great show overall, and I came away even more optimistic about analytics for the coming year. Here are some quick thoughts about what I thought was interesting / different about the Gartner BI Summit 2012 compared to previous years: The band played on: Gartner analysts Nigel Rayner and... [Read More...]
BI and The Limitations of Human Cognition in Den Bosch
I presented at my first conference of the year last week, the Heliview Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing 2012 conference in ‘s Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. The first keynote, by Erasmus scholar Dr. Roeland Dietvorst, was about “Performance Management in the Brain”, and a subject close to my heart: the (severe) limitations we evolved apes have when trying to make rational decisions. He illustrated his point with examples of great research... [Read More...]
What Mobile BI Used To Look Like, And Where It’s Going (Back to the Future!)
Note, this is an adapted, extended version of my post on the SAP Analytics Blog. Mobile BI has been around for a long time. Starting in the late-1990s, the first SMS-enabled telephones became mainstream in Europe, with basic broadcasting of the latest figures available in your BI system (or email, fax, pager, etc.). By the end of the decade, the first telephones with WAP browsers were used to provide interactive BI, quickly followed by connected PDAs... [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. Here’s... [Read More...]
The Office of Tomorrow — from 1945
I just stumbled on a 1945 Seagram’s ad describing “The Office of Tomorrow” as part of a great set of illustrations by X-Ray Delta One on Flickr: Key texts: “Face-to-face conferences through television will be held coast-to-coast, and intricate calculations of quotas or sales by territories will be turned out at the touch of an assistant’s finger. Records will appear as if by magic from files automatically operated in the electronic age... [Read More...]
Mobile Analytics Interview at ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference
Here’s a recording of a short mobile analytics interview done at the evening drinks reception at the recent ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference in Florida. As you can tell, a couple of glasses of wine had helped loosen my “passion” for the topic! There’s more detail in these posts on “mobile isn’t just about mobile” and “augmented corporate reality” (some of the links in the post are now out-of-date – see here for the... [Read More...]
At-a-Glance Guide to Analytics at SAPPHIRE NOW Madrid
I’ll be an official “social ambassador” for analytics at SAPPHIRE NOW from Madrid next week. This blog attempts to summarize the main analytics-related activities during the two days of SAPPHIRE NOW – but note that this year, SAPPHIRE NOW attendees also have access to all SAP TechEd sessions that are going on at the same time, making it even harder than usual to choose from the dizzying array of possible sessions (the SAP TechEd sessions... [Read More...]
SAP BusinessObjects User Conference 2011: Opening Keynote
It’s a stormy and sunny day here in Orlando, Florida, for the 2011 ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference in the Dolphin Hotel (ASUG members and conference attendees can see videos and download conference materials at http://www.asugonline.com/) Bridgette Chambers, CEO of the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) (@bchambersASUG on Twitter), kicked things to the packed room off by reminiscing about how much relations have improved... [Read More...]
Data Analysts, Data Scientists, and the Rest of Us
This post is part of a “blogorama” organized by smartdatacollective.com– see “The Emerging Role of the Analyst” for links to other bloggers’ views of this theme. Recently, I’ve been feeling like I’ve stepped through a looking glass to another similar-but-very-different world. I’m steeped in 20+ years in corporate data warehousing and business intelligence practice. Throughout that time, there have been big... [Read More...]
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