Season’s Greetings with Xcelsius!
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: I set up an Excel XML Connection that grabs a feed from Twitter using the search term “#twitterlights”. The... [Read More...]
What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius 2008 SP3?
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... [Read More...]
BI for Baby: Dashboards to Track Your Child’s KPIs (And The Rest of Us)
Prepare your child for the new world of business from its very earliest hours! Trixie Telemetry has released Trixie Tracker, which includes everything an analytic-obsessed parent needs to track baby’s key performance indicators, including: Sleep Tracking Bowel movements Feeding schedule Medicines And many, many more – including support for mobile: How much longer before this application is available for grownups, too? Well, it’s probably... [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...]
Grand Prix Business Intelligence
Last week I had the opportunity to attend VRAAAAAAAAAAAOOOMMMM a corporate event at the Belgian VRAAAAAAAAAAOOOOMMMMM Grand Prix, and present an SAP BusinessObjects product overview and roadmap. Unfortunately, the pleasure of having the opportunity to visit the famous Spa circuit, meeting Heikki Kovalainen, and seeing Lewis Hamilton at dinner was a little VRAAAAAAAOOOOOMMMMM drowned out by the constant, annoying VRAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOMMMM sound of race-cars... [Read More...]
SAP’s Sustainability Dashboards
The SAP’s Sustainability Report web site provides a great example of how business intelligence can help with sustainability reporting and analysis. All public organizations will have to start providing this time of information in the future, and SAP BusinessObjects provides some great tools to do it with. Here are some of the Xcelsius dashboards that are provided as part of the report: Environment Carbon Footprint
Great Examples of US Government BI Transparency
We’re clearly entering a new era in government transparency, and we can hope that allowing citizens to access information interactively through business intelligence functionality to spot inefficiencies and opportunities will be a big part of transforming the way the public sector works. In my previous post, I talked about how the American Recovery and Reinvestment act is perhaps the largest, most complex business intelligence application ever.... [Read More...]
Drink Dispenser Analytics: Coca-Cola Goes Freestyle, With Help from SAP BI
Mary Hayes Weier of InformationWeek recently published a great article, Coke’s RFID-Based Dispensers Redefine Business Intelligence. Coca-Cola has introduced a new RFID-enabled drink dispenser called Freestyle. It provides mass customization with 30 flavor cartridges (sodas, teas, flavored waters, etc.) that can be mixed to make more than 100 different drinks (out of the more than 3,000 that Coca-Cola sells around the world). Starting this... [Read More...]
Scandalous Financial Benchmarking?
I just stumbled across an old post of mine, and couldn’t help reposting some of it in the light of recent events. All those financial wizards were making a fortune based on the money they were “creating” — money that has since turned out to be largely fictitious. Top hedge fund managers were earning more in the time it took for an average New York City cab ride (8 minutes) than the average American made in a year. As I said with... [Read More...]
SAP Dashboards at Microsoft?
According to the Treasury & Risk site, Microsoft is a keen user of SAP dashboards, at least in conjunction with their treasury needs: Ed Barrie’s first daily task as group manager of treasury at Microsoft is opening up his treasury workstation from SAP and taking the pulse of its financial health. “The dashboard is great for horizontal processes like general ledger, accounts payable and managing our cash positions,” Barrie enthuses from... [Read More...]
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