(BYOD = Bring Your Own Device. BYOB = Bring Your Own Bottle.)

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 analytics.

Data Transparency and Hand-Washing Compliance

Cleveland Clinic uses SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (Xcelsius) to display information, change behavior, and avoid infections:

Cleveland Clinic has developed a program where staff from compliance anonymously watch workers in different departments and record whether they do in fact follow hand hygiene guidelines. Their findings are uploaded into Cleveland Clinic’s enterprise analytics system and are accessible via a dashboard tab.

Four years ago, the system was showing a 40 percent compliance rate with hand hygiene guidelines. Now the compliance rate is staying well over 90 percent, staving off a significant number of hospital-acquired infections and other complications arising from hygiene issues.

“That’s the critical value of data transparency—you can show people what they’re really doing as opposed to what they think they’re doing, and we can show it on a department, unit-by-unit or individual practitioner level,” says Steve Davis M.D. “I’ve found that when you put that kind of information in front of physicians, their competitive streak really comes out. No one likes to get a ‘C’ on their report card, and if you don’t have data everyone assumes they’re getting an ‘A.’ When they find out they’re not, then they get moving.”

[By coincidence, a post in the Decision Factor blog also takes up the theme of hand-washing this week, arguing that data cleansing is the single most important means of avoiding bad decisions. ]

Reducing Infections While Saving Money

By carefully collecting and analyzing data, Cleveland Clinic has been able to reduce infection rates, spend less on equipment, and avoid costs of up to $30,000 per affected patient:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that nearly 250,000 of the bloodstream infections occur annually from procedural issues associated with inserting and maintaining central lines—tubes inserted near the heart or a large blood vessel that are used to give fluids, antibiotics, medical treatments such as chemotherapy, and liquid food.

Overhauling the health system’s approach to central-line infections had a significant financial return in addition to the clinical benefits.

Before clinical and business analytics were applied, each individual unit was responsible for ordering their own lines, which meant that more than 30 different lines (and more than 90 different PICC lines, another type of tube) were being used across Cleveland Clinic, which was not only financially inefficient but also clinically dangerous.

By streamlining the purchasing to one vendor, the equipment and maintenance costs dropped significantly. And standardizing the clinical processes resulted in major cost avoidance—it’s estimated by the Health Research & Educational trust that central-line infections add upwards of $30,000 in treatment costs per afflicted patient.

Best-Practice Blood Transfusions

A blood transfusion dashboard helps identify physicians that haven’t kept up with the latest information in health best practice, improve the supply of blood, and reduces costs:

Andrew Proctor, administrative director of medical operations for Cleveland Clinic has developed a blood utilization dashboard that enables department heads and others to drill down to a physician level how much blood is being used for transfusions.

Standard industry practice used call for ordering transfusions if a patient’s hemoglobin count was below 10 after surgery or due to critical illness, But about a decade ago, says Davis, medical research showed convincingly that blood transfusions given at those hemoglobin values, and even significantly lower, in nearly all cases did more harm than good, providing few benefits and increasing the risks of nosocomial infections.

“Blood transfusions is another area where physician behavior has changed slower than the evidence, and our data is helping drive that behavioral change by enabling us to determine where blood utilization still goes against best practices, and addressing the issue on a unit or individual physician basis,” Davis says.

The result has been a significant reduction in blood utilization, which equates to a significant reductions in costs associated with maintaining the blood supply, and an improvement in patient outcomes.

Health Data + Analysis Saves Lives

I believe we’ve only scratched the surface of what is possible using analytics. New developments in big data mobile, cloud, analytic, and collaborative technology are combining to create new ways of improving health care.

Examples include the new SAP Collaborative E-Care Management application that connects patients, care providers and their families through medical monitoring software and mobile devices to better manage their health with individualized treatment plans:

And the pioneering work being done in conjunction with Charité, Europe’s largest teaching hospital, to enable mobile access to health data anytime, anywhere, including the SAP HANA-based Oncolyzer cancer-research application.

For more information, visit the Healthcare area of SAP.com

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 with basic HTML browsers.

Here’s what SAP BusinessObjects looked like on the Nokia 7110 in 1999, on a Compaq PDA running Windows Pocket IE, an AvantGo PDA, and a Japanese DoCoMo i-mode phone in 2001:

The arrival of all these new mobile devices was supposed to usher in a new dawn of mobile analytics. Here’s a slide from a presentation a decade ago by then-marketing-VP Dave Kellogg, including the heady prediction that “5-25% of companies indicated they already provide or will provide wireless access to BI within 6-12 months”.

Business Objects launched a big initiative to go after the mobile market, and managed to sell projects to customers including JP Morgan (Palm Pilots) and Zurich Insurance (a mobile extranet for risk managers).

But, clearly, the market didn’t take off – PDAs became more widely used, and phones got better, but they weren’t used much for BI. The user interfaces were too clunky and connection speeds were too slow. Interest in mobile BI did grow slowly over the decade, notably as RIM blackberry devices became ubiquitous, but it took the wide availability of 3G wireless and modern smartphones/tablets to provide truly usable interfaces.

Finally, a decade and a half after the first tentative steps, everybody seems to agree that this is the year that mobile BI will really take off.

2012 Is the Year of Mobile BI

Here’s a taste of the mountain of research data that’s been generated about mobile BI in the last few months:

• Boris Evelson of Forrester says mobile BI will go mainstream this year. “One needs to make decisions when and where they need to be made. Not ‘when I get back to the office,’ which may be too late.” He also says that “professionals must start evaluating and prototyping mobile BI platforms and applications to make sure that all key business processes and relevant information are available to knowledge workers wherever they are.”
• According to Gartner, “by 2013, 33 percent of BI functionality will be consumed via handheld devices.”
• A survey by analyst Howard Dresner indicates that BI has already become the third most in-demand enterprise mobile application, behind only email and personal information management apps such as calendars, and 68 percent of those surveyed rated mobile BI as “critical” or “very important,” up from 52 percent a year earlier.
• A recent survey by Information Week showed that 25 percent of organizations are planning to implement some form of BI this year.
• Sixty-one percent of the participants in a TDWI survey said that they expect users to spend more time accessing BI from mobile devices in the next 12 months.
• Business Intelligence and mobile are the top two technology priorities for CIOs in 2012.

Barriers to deployment

Not every organization is moving forward with mobile BI. Here are the main concerns:

• Security and administration: Organizations are concerned about data getting outside the organization, and the administration overhead generated by managing BI on mobile devices. A mobile device management (MDM) platform (not to be confused with the other MDM) like Sybase Afaria is key.
• Expectations-setting: An easy interface doesn’t mean that the data users want is readily available. New opportunities mean new requirements. Having the right data foundations in the first place, with a robust, standard BI platform in place makes it easier to react fast to user expectations.
• Platform choices: This is perhaps the biggest factor delaying widespread deployment. Just like the operating system wars of last century (remember IBM OS/2?), there’s no one obvious platform to standardize on for rolling out mobile applications. There are three main strategies, all with pros and cons:
  • Native applications—mobile applications written directly for iOs or Android. The advantage is optimal ease-of-use and access to the capabilities of the native device. The disadvantage is the cost and complexity of supporting multiple platforms and different user interfaces.
  • HTML—accessing mobile BI through a Web browser. The advantage is that you don’t care what device is being used to access the data – at least in theory. In reality, the disadvantage is that browser-based interfaces are generally far behind what’s possible using the native features. There are high hopes that the proposed HTML5 standard will help – but it hasn’tt yet reached maturity.
  • Hybrid solution—mobile enterprise platforms such as Sybase Unwired Platform. You create applications once, and then generate different versions of them optimized for different mobile platforms, including HTML. It’s an insurance measure against the turbulent real-life world of changing mobile platforms, but there’s some upfront investment.

An example of today’s mobile BI solutions -  SAP BusinessObjects Mobile showing the integrated Google maps pioneered by the Innovation Center.

Of course, most of us just want all these options to be available as part of the standard business intelligence platform – and that’s getting closer…

Next Steps

Gartner predicts that “by 2013, 15% of BI deployments will combine BI, collaboration and social software into decision-making environments”. In other words, mobile BI will become part of an “orchestrated” experience that combines accessing data with acting on it, and we’re starting to see this in the form of mobile medical analytics for doctors or mobile beauty advisor applications.

Interestingly, one brand new area of opportunities is the integration of mobile with voice-controlled interfaces such as Apple’s Siri. Business Objects was WAY ahead of the curve with this one, with the project codenamed “Ariel”. It sadly didn’t take off, but anybody who saw it demoed will have fond memories…

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 decision-making
• Easily “mobilizing” your existing BusinessObjects reports
• Support for each level of the “mobile needs hierarchy”, including fully customized mobile applications

• Demonstration of integration with RightHemisphere, a recent SAP acquisition that allows companies to synchronize visual and business data, combining a camera and schematic view:

Overlaying colors by temperature from data in the ERP system:

Finding a required part replacement using geolocation data:

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 the past:

• 1956 Transaction data volumes overloaded current memory systems, leading to IBM’s creation of the first hard drive (costing $10,000 per Mb)
• 1970 Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock popularizes the phrase “information overload”
• 1986 Technology critic Theodore Roszak:  “An excess of information may actually crowd out ideas, leaving the mind… distracted by sterile, disconnected facts, lost among shapeless heaps of data.”
• 1990 An IEEE conference features a session “Crisis in Mass Storage.”
• 1995 A Montreal data mining conference talks about the “data firehose phenomenon” swamping users

Interestingly enough, the guide manages to talk a lot about Big Data without mentioning what many people associate the term with: open source technologies such as Hadoop/Map Reduce. This is all the stranger because the latest version of Sybase IQ 15.4 includes a native MapReduce API and Hadoop integration, getting closer to the ideal architectures of the future that take the best of both worlds.

The guide also slides over the advantages of in-memory storage such as SAP HANA, noting just that “64-bit systems with their larger RAM space make this technology more attractive, if more expensive”

For more on SAP HANA and Sybase IQ, here’s analyst group Ovum’s take: “SAP’s HANA and Sybase IQ are separate but complementary“

The guide concludes that:

“Big Data is not to be feared. It’s to be exploited. The analytics industry today has no excuses when it comes to working with Big Data. It has no excuses when it comes to scaling their analytics data warehouse to include thousands of users. It has no excuses when it comes to applying analytics to variable data types from every imaginable source, including, for example, the vast unstructured information from social media sites.”

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 latest info). You can get more information about SAP BusinessObjects Mobile products here: SAP Real-Time Mobile Analytics

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 since the SAP and BusinessObjects user groups came together for the first time at the ASUG BusinessObjects conference four years ago.

She cheered up many in the crowd by announcing the extension of the ASUG Valueship for another year (complimentary membership for North American BusinessObjects customers).

She explained that next year’s joint SAP BusinessObjects User Conference and SAP Analytics conference will again be in Orlando, 9th-12th September (book the date!), and urged everybody to take a more active part in the user group.

Steve Lucas, Global GM of SAP Business Analytics delivered the main keynote (@nstevenlucas on Twitter). After an intro worthy of a standup comedian (explaining that the “get 20%” signs on stage were just props, not a promise of future discounts: “SAP is still SAP”) , he explained that membership of the usergroup leads to concrete benefits: “I talk a lot to customers, and I can tell you that BusinessObjects customers are happier when they’re a member of ASUG”.

He went on to emphasize that SAP had delivered on the promises from last year’s user conference: BI 4.0, SAP HANA, BI Mobile, and Line of Business solutions all went production in the course of the year — and gave out his email (steve.lucas@sap.com) to anybody who needed his help.

The focus of the presentation was BI 4.0. Steve: “What’s New in BI 4.0? Everything!”

He then went on to elaborate the key themes of the release:

Openness

“When did being open get passé?!” asked Steve: “Open is still cool. Being open is powerful.” He explained that the ability to access ANY data is one of the key strengths of BusinessObjects: “We are freakin’ open. We can report off of smoke signals.”

He illustrated the point showing off the real-time integration capabilities with a retail demo. “Here’s the ‘traditional’ dashboard that shows you your sales by store, that looks so good that your CEO would love it, even if he didn’t understand it”:

“But let’s see what you can do with real real-time data”. As he grabbed a pair of jeans, a security camera tracked the movement and added extrapolated information such as an estimate of gender and age (this is a real retail solution from a partner).

As Steve chose a pair of Jeans, a “conversion” was registered in the dashboard at the top of the screen:

Geographic location

Steve was joined up on stage by Jason Rose, VP of BI solution marketing (@rosejason on Twitter),, showing a demo of the integration between SAP and Google Maps: “not just what and when: where!”. Jason did a great demo of the third-party GMaps Plugin for Dashboards by Ryan Goodman of Centigon Solutions that allows you to draw areas on the screen that you’d like to analyze further.

Social

Jason then did a demonstration of sentiment analysis on a twitter stream, using Text Analysis and Dashboards: “social data shouldn’t be yet another silo with a specific solution” (you can take a look at the technology yourself at the experience SAP web site).

Mobile

Stephanie Buscemi, Group VP of Marketing, Business Analytics, did a world premiere demo of the next version of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer including offline explorationand the new “Exploration Views” prototyped by the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation center (available first half of next year). Stephanie also showed the latest BusinessObjects Mobile BI product that allows you to access Web Intelligence reports on an iPad.

Hana

Fred Samson came up on stage to demonstrate affinity analysis using SAP Dashboards on top of a HANA datasource — real-time access to 3 Terabytes of retail data, with sub-second response times.

Collaborative

My personal favorite of the show: Jack Miller, GVP for SAP Streamwork and BI OnDemand talked about collaborative business intelligence, with BI information included in a StreamWork “Activity”, and StreamWork feeds appearing directly within the BI portal.

Steve finished up with a summary of why he believes SAP BusinessObjects provides the most complete suite of analytic products available today on the market

There are more photos available on flickr, and a recording of the full keynote will be available within 24 hours on the http://www.asugonline.com/ web site.

It’s an unspoken assumption that mobile BI extends normal BI: almost all the coverage so far emphasizes the usefulness of these devices for people out of the office: on the road, or on the factory floor – and it’s hard not to agree that there is a great opportunity to bring business intelligence to new classes of users. In particular, executives spend their lives running around visiting different departments and divisions, asking people to justify (and improve) their performance. Having the dashboards at their fingertips, as they ask the questions, is an extremely powerful tool that makes the managing process more efficient (aka “if you’re finished arguing your opinions, I actually have some data…”)

But I think “mobile BI” goes further than that, and will increasingly replace existing full-client BI systems. Today’s mobile devices aren’t just small enough to stick in your pocket, they also tend to use state-of-the-art, multi-touch interfaces.  Just like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, it’s simply more intuitive and easy to access  information using your fingertips than it is a mouse. Increasingly, I find myself reaching for my iPad to access data, rather than my laptop, even when it’s right in front of me.

Today’s mobile devices are simply better for analysis, and their children will replace BI on PCs, not just augment it. Looking to the future, the lines between mobile and traditional devices is blurring fast: tablets are becoming more powerful, and supporting “traditional” operating systems like Windows, and laptops are starting to come installed with multi-touch touchpads, GPS and 3G connections. “Mobile” will no longer be a separate environment, but a seamless part of a normal rollout.

One factor, however, may delay the process. For many years, vendors have had the luxury of fairly simply platform choices in the enterprise world: Windows or a browser as the front end, Windows/Unix/Linux as the back end. But there’s been an explosion of different mobile device operating systems and multi-touch interfaces, with no end to the confusion in sight. HTML 5 will almost certainly help, but there’s a long way to go before it’s strong enough to replace existing choices for intuitive, device-optimized, multi-touch interfaces. Multiple choices means extra work for the vendors, and slower deployment/adoption of the new interfaces in enterprise environments.

The device runs Android 2.2, which supports Adobe Flash, so the first thing I tried was a couple of dashboards suitable for executives on the run, built using BusinessObjects Dashboard (formerly Xcelsius). First, the same Formula 1 example that I previously tried out on my Google Nexus One phone.

Then I loaded up a dashboard from Donald MacCormick, that uses his flashy Globe component:

I also would have liked to get the chance to try out the brand-new mobile dashboards functionality provided by Antivia, that makes it easy to provide a single Xcelsius dashboard that automatically adapts to a mobile interface – but Antivia CEO Mark Hudson has promised to post a video of the experience at some point.

Overall, the experience was generally very similar to the Nexus phone. The dashboards felt a little sluggish, especially when I was using the graphics-intensive transitions, but basic navigation worked fine.

There were a few differences compared to the Google Phone:

• Unlike with the Nexus, you couldn’t hold your finger down on the dashboard in the browser in order to maximize it to full screen size (and get rid of the top bar) – but you could pinch to zoom, and pan with your finger, which isn’t possible with my Nexus phone.
• The zooming and panning seemed a little tricky to use in the dashboard context (i.e. when you’re trying to avoid clicking on one of the buttons at the same time) – for example, I could zoom in on Donald’s Globe, but once I’d done so, I could no longer use a slide gesture to turn the globe – it was interpreted as a gesture to pan the whole dashboard instead. This would probably have been easier to use with a bit more practice, but it underlines that Flash isn’t yet really optimized for touch devices.
• Because of the larger screen size, it was much easier to click in the right place, making it feasible to use the same dashboard for the screen and for the mobile device.

Next, I tried out SAP BusinessObjects OnDemand. Since it uses a mixture of HTML and Flash, it worked very well – here’s the list of available reports once I logged on:

And here’s an example of a formatted report. Using a web-based reporting tool like Web Intelligence or Crystal Reports on a mobile device browser is a joy: the pinch and panning gestures work perfectly, making it easy to move around a big report and zoom in on the important details.

Overall, the size and form factor of the Galaxy Tab seemed like a good business compromise – much lighter and easier to stick in a pocket than the iPad, but with much more useable screen space than a mobile phone. It already works well for analytic interfaces that use HTML, and while the useability of the Flash-based dashboards isn’t perfect, it’s at least possible, unlike the iPad.

Personally, I chafe at the restrictions imposed by Apple on their devices (for example, it’s deliberately awkward to create and distribute prototypes of applications without signing their license agreements), and I hate every second I’m forced to use iTunes (I don’t have a Mac, and it’s a horrible, slow, bug-ridden experience using my PC).

So overall, I’m a strong candidate for Android-power devices like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and I’m sure I would use it more for business than the iPad, which I tend to find too underpowered and annoying for real work (e.g. the infuriating keyboard that forces you to go to a second screen just to type an apostrophe), and yet too bulky to put in a pocket to use on the move.

However, Android 2.2 doesn’t really seem to get the most out of the device. I’m looking forward to the next version of Android (“Gingerbread”), due out very shortly, which will be more optimized for tablet devices. With the new OS, Android-powered tablets like the Galaxy Tab should take their rightful place as serious business competitors to the iPad.

The SAP BusinessObjects Augmented Explorer prototype mentioned in previous posts, created by the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center now available, as a standard part of the BusinessObjects Explorer for iPhone / iPad download from the Apple App Store. You’ll find some pictures below taken from official blog post and you can download the official documentation and samples here.

Here’s a video demo I did of a slightly-older version of the prototype, showing you how it works (the icons aren’t as jumpy now!):

Here’s a diagram showing how it works:

This diagram and some other mockups of how the tool might be used are available as a PowerPoint presentation – and you can create your own mockups by ungrouping the elements, replacing the pictures, moving the points, etc.

Some screen shots of the final version:

I also put together another sample data set, that includes some links to extra graphics, and generates a random set of numbers and locations around a point that you choose: download the Excel spreadsheet (after you’ve uploaded it to BI OnDemand, don’t forget to set the first column to “MIN” in the Explorer view!)

Finally, here are some graphics that may be useful for the Points of Interest, showing both a trend (the arrow), and whether it’s on target or now (the background color. It’s available in two ways, to make it easier to use in Excel calculations, etc: first as a straight 1-9:

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Then as two numbers – the first indicates the type of arrow, the second indicates the background color (see the spreadsheet above for an example of how to use this)

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Then some miscellaneous icons

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And finally, here’s a Photoshop file containing all the layers used in the icons above, that you can use to develop your own (you’ll need a public server to put them on)

Please provide the SAP Innovation Center feedback to make sure we know how you’re using this and things you would like to see it do in the future. Please remember, this is a prototype only and NOT for use in production environments.

Also stay connected with SAP BusinessObjects innovation center RSS feed or Twitter feed.