What I Learned about BI at SAP World Tour UK 2010

The SAP World Tour touched down at the ICC in Birmingham in the UK on July 8th, part of a program covering 80+ cities across the globe. Business intelligence was featured heavily throughout the day: during the keynotes, on the show floor, in several innovation sessions, and a dedicated afternoon BI track. This post gives an overview of the day, discusses the content of sessions in the BI track, and includes links to all the presentation materials... [Read More...]

Nordic SAP BusinessObjects BI Butterfly Events

Next week sees the start of the Nordic SAP BusinessObjects BI Forums in Stockholm (April 13), Copenhagen (April 15), Oslo (April 27), and Helsinki (April 29). Join us for these free events to find out: “…how successful industry leaders turns data into insight-driven business decisions. Don’t miss out on this exclusive opportunity to learn from managers and experts how to optimize your business performance. This is the conference day of... [Read More...]

Top BI Questions Blog Posts of 2009

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... [Read More...]

Integrating Live Twitter Streams into PowerPoint Using Xcelsius

As a frequent presenter, I’ve been wanting to add some more interaction to presentations for a long time. A couple of years ago, I used some .php code I found on the web and an early version of Xcelsius to display a ticker bar during the presentation that contained the subject lines of emails sent to a particular address. And after some frustration, I even managed to put together a simple voting-by-email service that was adapted by the BusinessObjects... [Read More...]

Delivering Results with Business Intelligence

Here’s one of the presentations I gave at Sapphire last month. It is a high-level, introductory overview that covers key business intelligence themes and how to overcome the major barriers to successful deployments: data integration, ease of use, and cost of deployment. It is illustrated (inevitably) with examples of Business Objects technology. Link to a PDF version of the presentation Link to the PPT file (15mb)  Read More →

Crossing the Chasm: Delivering a Strategic, Enterprise BI System

The third and final web seminar presentation on BI Maturity that I did last week with Wayne Eckerson: how to make BI a strategic asset for the organization. As I joked with Wayne on the call, I think the maturity model probably needs extending with an additional ”canyon”, because many organizations have managed to deploy BI enterprise-wide, but still haven’t managed to connect it with the strategy and finances of the organization. Click... [Read More...]