SAP Visual Intelligence
SAP Visual Intelligence 1.0 (internal project name “Hilo”) will generally available tomorrow*. It is the latest innovation in the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer solution family. It is a desktop-based visualization and data manipulation solution that is designed to complement (not replace) the existing Explorer products. After downloading and installing the application (approximately 150 MB), users can connect to SAP HANA sources and start data... [Read More...]
Are You Ready For SAP’s Big Data Processing Framework?
Steve Lucas, EVP of Database and Technology, unveiled SAP’s Big Data Processing Framework at the keynote session of SAP Insider BI2012 in Orlando earlier this year. I was honored to have the opportunity to be on stage with Steve for the first time, and we were ably assisted by Fred Samson. In the recorded session below, we discuss what “big data” means, why you should care, and how SAP is making it easy to Ingest, Store, Process, and Present... [Read More...]
BI Past, Present, Future — Interview with TEC
Note: the following post is republished with permission from Technology Evaluation Center’s excellent blog. It is a part of a series of interviews by Jorge Garcia on trends in the analytic industry. It is hard to imagine that organizations like SAP or former Business Objects (BO)—now a division of SAP—were once start-up companies. Nowadays on the business intelligence (BI) scene it’s almost impossible to avoid BusinessObjects. Like... [Read More...]
Fashion + Analytics + Social = The Perfect Ensemble
I’ll be presenting at Decoded Fashion next week at the Lincoln Center in New York: “The first Fashion and Technology Forum Series connecting the world’s best startups and most noteworthy technologies to the Fashion, Beauty and Retail industries to accelerate innovation and increase the bottom line.” It promises to be fascinating, with a wide range of sessions on different aspects of using technology in the fashion business, including... [Read More...]
Innovation by SAP Nordic Forums
I’ve had the huge pleasure of presenting at a series of Innovation by SAP events across the Nordic region. Please find below my two presentations from the sessions in Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Stockholm (note: only incremental changes from the presentations in the Baltic region in a previous post) The keynote presentation: Business In The Moment: From Reactive to Proactive 2012 will be a year of business transformation. New technologies such... [Read More...]
Concrete Examples of How Health Intelligence Saves Lives
An excellent article in Health Data Management by Greg Gillespie gives some wonderful examples of the power of analytics to improve health outcomes, looking at data from some of the 2,000+ clinical trials that Cleveland Clinic is currently running. I strongly encourage you to read the original article (also available in pdf format), but here are summaries of the three use cases highlighted: hand-washing analytics, central-line analytics, and blood-transfusion... [Read More...]
2012: The Year Analytics Means Business
The real trend this year is not the technology. It’s about helping business people make better decisions, and actually change the way companies do business. Analytics has always been about transforming business, but the recent huge changes in analytic technology have created interesting new opportunities for business innovation. Most organizations are now starting to understand the technical opportunities, but many struggle to apply those new opportunities... [Read More...]
Social + Product = Better Products: Meet The Panelists
[UPDATE: Here's a link to the recorded panel session of Social+Products=Better Products on Wednesday, February 15th, from 3pm to 4.30pm PST, as part of Social Media Day at SAP Palo Alto. See this post on Products+Social=Better Products for more details of the topics discussed. ] Panel Session Outline Here’s the outline of the panel session: 3:00-3:15 Key themes and Introductions: 3:15-3:35 Improving products through social techniques: 3:35-3:55... [Read More...]
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...]
I was the eighth employee of 
