It’s the ASUG SAP BusinessObjects User Conference next week, October 5-7th, at the Walt Disney Swan and Dolphin Hotel in Orlando, Florida. There are over 140 sessions planned covering every aspect of getting the most out of your BI implementation.

As usual, there are so many sessions that it’s going to be hard to choose which to attend — here are some that caught my eye. I’ve introduced each session with the reasons you might be interested, and then added the presentation summary from the conference web site. Sorry in advance: they are in no particular order, and of course there are lots of other great presentations that I didn’t get around to adding here.

Maybe see you in the sessions!

Achieving Remarkable Results

Speaker: Steve Lucas

Why you might be interested in attending: (1) doh: it’s the main keynote (2) Steve has a long history with Crystal / BusinessObjects, pioneered the BusinessObjects OnDemand vision, and (after a short spin at Salesforce.com) we’re very happy to have him back in charge of all “business user” products for SAP in the US (3) even if he’s (probably) not going to try to include a live monkey in his presentation this time (ask him about it), he’s still a great, dynamic presenter (4) I’m told the session is going to focus on all the great innovation being delivered.

Today’s “new reality” is driving an evolved perspective on how companies must manage in a world of accelerated change. As a result, the demands on IT and LOB leaders to deliver more value and enable greater flexibility continues to increase. In this keynote address, Steve Lucas will discuss how SAP BusinessObjects is collaborating with and supporting customers to meet these demands. Customers are SAP’s most important constituency; hear directly from Steve how SAP embodies this value every day.

The Future of SAP BusinessObjects Analytics

Speakers: Jason Rose, George Mathew

Why you might be interested in attending: it’s another main keynote, this time at 4pm on Wednesday afternoon. Jason is THE person in charge of rolling out V4 successfully, and George Mathew is in charge of Business Intelligence and In-memory Analytics in the product group.

Get a glimpse into the future of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence and Enterprise Information Management technology. This session will focus on BI trends, illustrated with as much information as possible about the upcoming release of BusinessObjects V4.

SAP BusinessObjects BI at Harley Davidson – Lessons Learned. Harley Davidson

Speakers: Joel Janke, Jim Keene, Ingo Hilgefort
Why you might be interested: Harley-Davidson have been on the leading edge of business intelligence for well over a decade, using BI extranets to drive great value – and now they’re taking it to the next level. Oh, and Ingo is one of the foremost BusinessObjects experts in the world and literally wrote the book on Reporting and Analytics with SAP BusinessObjects.

In this session Harley Davidson will present how they are using SAP BusinessObjects BI – in particular Web Intelligence and Xcelsius – to offer their dealerships reports and analytics to run their business better. Harley Davidson will present the value the SAP BusinessObjects BI solution is providing to their dealerships, present their overall landscape as well present their lessons learned. In addition this session will be followed by a set of best practices for the SAP BusinessObjects BI portfolio presented by Ingo Hilgefort.

Beyond the Field of Dreams: Building a Culture of Analytics

Speaker: Nick Strauss
Why you might be interested: Business intelligence success is NOT about technology, it’s about people, and changing the way you do business. Take this opportunity to step away from the feeds and speeds, and reflect on what really counts (but sadly, this is at the exact same time as the Harley Davidson presentation).

Just building a data warehouse isn’t enough: without a demand for business intelligence, users will not come to even the best analytic field of dreams. This presentation details how T-Mobile USA leverages the Business Objects XI suite to create a “culture of analytics” and build demand for business intelligence and analytics. Overcoming a complex environment with dozens of data sources and diverse tools, an integrated strategy of marketing, training, and user support is developing a user base that appreciates analytics and possesses a growing capacity to meet their own needs needs using Infoview, Webi, LiveOffice, and other Business Objects tools.

SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center Prototypes

Speaker: Isabelle Nuage

Why you might be interested: the BusinessObjects innovation center team are leading the way in SAP by using Web 2.0 techniques: build prototypes, share them, get feedback, provide great products. They have a great track record – look out for the features and functionality that will make it into V5.

Attend this session to learn about all the latest innovations from the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center. The team is focused on leveraging emerging technologies to deliver innovations that continue to simplify and extend the value of SAP BusinessObjects portfolio to more people. Its objectives: develop & explore innovations for potential inclusion in future products Its principles:

• Learn by doing: actively learn by building for & validating with customers
• Work collaboratively with customers, partners and developers
• Leverage emerging technologies where appropriate

Best Practices for BI Success

Speaker: Cindi Howson

Why you might be interested: Analyst and blogger Cindi was in charge of BI projects with BusinessObjects for many years, and then literally wrote the book on successful business intelligence. She knows what she’s talking about!

Business Intelligence is helping visionary companies thrive in a tough economy and beat the competition. What is so different about their approach to BI and how can you apply these secrets to your own BI program? Based on research from the book Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App and 2009 survey results, this presentation highlights how and why BI has made a difference in visionary companies, yet floundered in others. Simply establishing a data warehouse and deploying BI tools is not enough. Success hinges on how the technology is deployed and on organizational aspects companies often fail to tackle such as the business-IT partnership. These insights and best practices will let you benchmark your BI deployment against the industry and help increase the impact BI has on your company’s performance.

Visualization for Experts

Speaker: Donald MacCormick

Why you might be interested: I think Holos / Crystal Reports / BusinessObjects veteran Donald maybe did a bad presentation once, twenty years ago — but certainly not since then. And Antivia is the coolest BusinessObjects partner of all (running neck and neck with ex-Xcelsius team at RoamBI).

Ever wished for a different visualization for your Xcelsius dashboard? Maybe how to connect to different operational data sources or perhaps even visualize your data in 3D? This presentation will show you how you can add these powerful capabilities to your Xcelsius dashboard initiatives through use of the Xcelsius SDK.

Thanks to the Xcelsius SDK the last two years has seen an explosion of third party add-on components for Xcelsius that add real value. In this presentation you will see for yourself the value that these components can add to your Xcelsius dashboards. Live demonstrations will show how easy it is to add custom components and data connections to your dashboards and how they can take your visualisations to the next level and beyond.

Xcelsius + Google Maps + 15 Minutes: A Coding Must-See

Speaker: Ryan Goodman

Why you might be interested: Ryan knows more about Xcelsius and making great dashboards than just about anyone – and has a great blog. He’ll be talking about the brand-new GMap 2.0 plugin for Xcelsius.

Learn from an Xcelsius guru how to drag-and-drop Google Maps’ simplicity into your business intelligence application without any coding or server installation. Google Maps Premier coupled with SAP Crystal Dashboard Design (Xcelsius) creates the ultimate experience for information consumers to assess performance. From real-time street-level risk analysis to worldwide sales, see how other users currently combine on-the-premises business intelligence with cloud-based mapping to drive real ROI. Watch a live demonstration and learn how you can load live data into a Google Maps-enabled dashboard in minutes, not days! Join us and get exclusive access to free content along with a sneak peek at the next breakthrough. Google Maps designs for the masses!

A Comprehensive Guide and Roadmap to SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Solutions

Speaker: James Fisher

Why you might be interested: I find most BI people aren’t close enough to the finance function, which has its own — completely different – way of collecting and aggregating data. Here’s how to get up to speed on the products that should be part of your BI strategy.

Understand the functionality available with the new SAP BusinessObjects enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions that support strategy management planning, budgeting and forecasting, financial consolidation, XBRL and profitability and cost management. Understand how enterprise performance management integrates with SAP ERP, SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence (BI), and governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solutions. Leave this session with a strong foundational understanding of SAP BusinessObjects EPM solutions and the road map moving forward.

Introducing Roambi Blink: Fast, visual, multi-dimensional analysis, in the palm of your hand

Speaker: Santiago Becerra

Why you might be interested: RoamBI are cool. What more do you need?

In-memory computing is emerging as one of the most important trends in the BI space. It provides business professionals with super-quick, self-service analysis of business intelligence. In this session, the creators of the interactive mobile dashboard will unveil Roambi Blink – the new Roambi View designed specifically for visually interacting with in-memory BI systems such as SAP BW Accelerator. Roambi Blink’s distributed in-memory processing delivers lightning-fast, locally-stored, highly-interactive mobile dashboards on any iPhone or iPad – so you can quickly access and analyze critical company data, whether or not you are connected to your BI system. Come and see multi-dimensional analysis – in the blink of an eye, in the palm of your hand.

Solving the BI Puzzle at PepsiCo

Speaker: Yelak Biru

Why you might be interested: Yelak has been working with BusinessObjects for a long time. 90+ deployments and 26,000+ users leads to deep wisdom…

Is a BI Strategy really necessary to take your BI Practice to the next level? What are the real challenges of putting one together? Spanning 12+ years of SAP and SAP BusinessObjects experience, and covering both the business and tool aspect of the strategy, PepsiCo will share real life business scenarios and cover challenges and successes along with lessons learned. Deployed in almost all Business Units of PepsiCo, spanning 90+ applications and 26,000+ users, come learn how one of the largest SAP deployments in the world is using Business Objects suite of tools to solve the BI Puzzle and 1Up its competition.

Guided Tour of Information Design Tool, SAP’s Next Generation Modeling Tool

Speaker: Frank Prabel

Why you might be interested: Universes are still at the heart of BusinessObjects power, and Frank has been working on the semantic layer for over a decade.

Come and discover universe Designer’s successor through a complete demonstration of the new Information Design Tool. If you are not familiar with those tools or the semantic layer concept, come to see a preview of SAP’s next-generation modeling tool. In this session, you will get a live overview of the tool’s major features, which will give you the base necessary to attend other, more detailed presentations. A must-see session if you use universes or universe Designer.

Managing a Business Intelligence Center of Excellence (BI COE) with SAP BusinessObjects

Speaker: Adam Getz

Why you might be interested: if you don’t yet have a competency center of center of excellence, you need to start working on one…

This session provides an overview of the concept of a Business Intelligence Center of Excellence (BI COE) and how Business Objects can be leveraged as an enterprise reporting and dashboarding standard. It is intended for professionals at all levels of an organization and anyone that is interested understanding how a BI COE can be beneficial to their own organization. In addition, this presentation provides details on “best practices” on utilizing Business Objects on an enterprise level and how Business Objects can be incorporated into a BI COE.

Taking BI Mobile

Speaker: Emily Mui

Why you might be interested: red-hot topic, and real issues for companies wanting to do it in an industrial-strength way.

Everyone is talking, breathing and living mobile. iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile or Symbian? Which mobile platforms is your company using today? Where do you start with a mobile BI solution that will deliver you real business value? What types of companies are successful in doing that today? What does SAP BusinessObjects offer in enabling anytime access to BI? Come hear and see the latest in what SAP has to offer in delivering business intelligence in the palm of your hands.

Metadata Madness

Speaker: Alan Meyer

Why you might be interested: this is one of two sessions by Alan, who is consistently the best-rated speaker at the BusinessObjects user conference events, and this topic is even more important than what he normally covers.

Business intelligence has become so popular that information on the data collected and analyzed is now a vital source of information all by itself. This metadata is extremely valuable in its own right when you’re trying to understand how your data is consumed and by whom; the answers to these questions can streamline your BI efforts. Unfortunately for most companies, many of these insights aren’t realized since metadata is never analyzed. This session hopes to change that attitude by introducing Metadata Manager as a tool that can cull those insights and present the findings online. The key points for using Metadata Manager will be covered, illustrated by demonstrations using real-world scenarios. If you’re wondering how many of those 150 universes are really needed or what impact changing a table will have on thousands of production reports, this session is for you.

Discovery vs. Delivery: A Comparison of Client Reporting Tools

Speakers: Brian Durning, David Rathbun

Why you might be interested: this is one of two sessions by David, who is also one of the top-rated presenters at BusinessObjects events, and, let’s face it, everybody has the tool front-end selection issue…

There is a saying that goes something like this: If your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail. What if you have more than one tool? Then it becomes a challenge to figure out which is the best tool for a particular job. As BusinessObjects developers we have several different tools available. This presentation will discuss strengths of the client tools and offer advice on how to select the proper tool for the job. We will cover only the client tools, specifically Crystal, Web Intelligence, and Xcelsius.

Cool BI Tends – and How to Prepare for Them

Speaker: Timo Elliott

Why you might want to attend: well of course I’m going to pitch my own presentation! I’m going to try to keep it honest and wide-ranging (i.e. not only about products sold by SAP) – what are the technology areas you should realistically be looking at for the coming few years? Wednesday from 9:15-10:15 am in the Southern Hemisphere Room, Salon 4:

Where is BI going, and what should you be doing to “future-proof” your current implementations? This session will take you beyond next year’s products, with an overview of the key technology trends that will impact your business intelligence architectures and user interfaces, including augmented corporate reality, XML and semi-structured data, NoSQL databases, social media and collaboration, etc.

• How is BI evolving and overlapping with other technology areas?
• What are the key new trends and possibilities?
• What you should should be doing today to prepare?

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 used.

Tim Noble, the UK Managing Director, kicked the day off with a review of the current trends affecting technology and the economy as a whole, and reiterating SAP’s high-level strategic themes of On-Premise, On-Demand, On-Device, and Orchestration. If you’re interested in hearing more about this, check out the keynote videos from the SAPPHIRE NOW web site.

Sanjay Poonen, SAP’s head of business user and line of business solutions, came up to present on the theme of customer-centric innovation, illustrated with customers who had used information to change the way they did business.

The Guest Speaker for the event was Jonathan Neale, the Managing Director of the McLaren racing team (sponsored by SAP, among others), who gave a wonderful presentation explaining how his organization worked to increase their performance. He drew many parallels between the challenges of Formula 1 racing and the rest of the business world.

For example, the team relies heavily on analytics to increase the driver performance, including real-time telemetry and benchmarking of the two drivers on the team, to ensure the best possible numbers at each point of the course:

Video and GPS is used to work out the best line to take through each bend:

And, just like in the business world, experience and intuition is important, and must be added into the analysis – in this case, the drivers’ hand-written notes about how they felt about the car’s handling at different points around the course:

After lunch, the afternoon breakout sessions started, including a dedicated BI track, devoted to the BusinessObjects BI and EIM set of products.

I kicked off the afternoon with a “mini-keynote” presentation on the Business Intelligence Future: Simple, Seamless, Social, and Strategic (very similar to previous presentations of the same title, if you’re already downloaded them). The slides are available for download in PowerPoint format or as an Adobe PDF document.

Next up was a well-received end-to-end data-to-dashboard “demo fest” by Ian Henry and Barry Dodds (which I unfortunately missed because of journalist meetings – I hope to be able to follow up with their content at a later date).

Then Richard Neale talked about The Powers of Pervasion: the benefits of pervasive BI, and how to achieve it.

Interesting statistics included: the benefits of widespread BI adoption, including improving the time required to gather information and to make decisions:

Organisations with pervasive BI saw an average 24% increase in operating profit:

The importance of self-service delivery of information as part of pervasive BI deployments:

The best ways to improve and encourage BI usage:

Recommended resources included several analyst white papers and the books “Competing on Analytics” and “Analytics at Work” by Thomas Davenport et al.

Richard also outlined SAP’s four-step process for developing a solid BI strategy, with a series of interactive “playbooks” that help you guide through the process:

Next came Dean Farrow, talking about the BI innovations in the XI 3.1 service packs 1 and 2, which contain more new features than you may have realized.

Highlights in SP2 include:

Highlights in SP3 include:

Carl Streatfield followed up with an in-depth explanation of the BusinessObjects onDemand offerings

Carl explained the many benefits of BI OnDemand:

• No messy software install
• No more service packs or bug fixes
• No training staff on how to administer it
• No need to buy, maintain a server and deal with IT
• Always 24×7 availability
• Multi-tenanted
• OpEx rather than CapEx

And he outlined a list of questions that helps determine whether a BI OnDemand offer is the right fit for your project:

• Are you on a tight time line?
• Do you use Salesforce.com or any other SAAS offering?
• Do you have tight IT resources (personal and hardware wise)?
• Are you having challenges getting access to CAPEX?
• Do you want share data with customers/partners?
• Are you allowed to put data outside of your firewall?
• Are there any legislative reasons why you can’t?
• Do you absolutely need to connect to On-Premise data? (ie: BW)
• Do you worry about peak usage on your BI system?

To round out the day, Andy Hirst covered the range of BusinessObjects Industry Business Analytics applications.

Andy covered the range of analytic applications currently available:

As well as their technical architecture, and details about each solution.

Overall, it was a great day, and we look forward to doing the same next year!

And here’s a full set of pictures from the event:

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 the year for business users with a professional interest in business intelligence (BI); information management (IM); enterprise performance management (EPM); and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC).”

I’ll be presenting the morning keynote in each location – view the video below to get a quick overview of the topics I’ll be covering.

You can register for the events here, and I look forward to seeing you there!

[Update:
Here's the keynote presentation as a pdf file, and as a ppt file
Here's the BI session presentation as a pdf file, and as a ppt file]

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 it’s like putting lipstick on a pig, and that it would be a crime not to include analytics in applications — but also that we’re all really bad at making decisions.

March’s posts were about BI in Bahrain, Brussels, and on the Bosphorus, making tough decisions, BI incompetency centers, scandalous bankers making more money having a shower than the rest of us make in a year, the wonderful Innovation Center and Social Network Analyzer, and more problems with bad data.

April’s posts covered more news on the Social Network Analyzer, the importance of taking account risk in business intelligence, and how BusinessObjects users think they know everything.

May included a trip to Australia with presentations on why BI projects fail and what to do about it, BI competency centers, and transforming BI; the launch of Wolfram Alpha and the inevitable problem of semantics, the launch of BusinessObjects Explorer and a not-for-profit analytics example.

June saw posts on everything you ever wanted to know about Explorer, BI market shares, Gartner and collaborative decision-making, dispenser analytics, the end of LucidEra, and the start of Recovery Act analytics.

July saw some more great examples of government BI transparency, a fun opportunity to test your decision-making skills, predictions about the end of relational databases and augmented BI reality.

August saw presentations in Belgium and South Africa, the launch of SAP’s sustainability dashboards, and a discussion of whether anybody cares about BI market share.

September’s posts included the first BI Fails and BI Briefs, including my opinions on BI futures, why it’s important to have more than one KPI, and the most annoying business words of the year.

October’s posts included how to incorporate live twitter into PowerPoint using Xcelsius, the problems of manual analysis and justice, and highlights of SAP TechEd in Vienna.

November’s posts included how to use Twitter to surf through traffic, the death of OLAP, and tracking baby’s KPIs

December saw Explorer for the iphone, the release of a new version of Xcelsius, some Season’s Greetings showing off the new features, and a great roundup of posts for the year.

Thank you for reading, and I look forward to 2010!

SAP Influencer Summit

Let’s start with the SAP Influencer Summit. You can see the full list of recorded keynote sessions here (registration required). If you’re interested in SAP Web 2.0 technology, you’ll find examples in the presentations by Jim Snabe, Visha’l Sikka, Marge Breya and John Wookey.

And take a look at one of the featured videos, about “Real Real-Time Computing”, a subject that came up regularly throughout the sessions:

Several hundred people attended the event in Boston, and there’s been lots of coverage, from the analysts and bloggers who attended – here’s a small sample:

• InformationWeek: SAP Outlines Five-Year Enterprise Plan
• ITBusiness.ca: SAP Wants to Transform its ERP Image
• SearchSAP: SAP: We’re Serious about SAP On-Demand
• InfoWorld: SAP plans to open up on-demand development platform
• Ray Wang: Event Report: 2009 SAP Influencer Summit – SAP Must Put Strategy To Execution In Order To Prove Clarity Of Vision
• Oliver Marks: The Clear Path Forward for the SAP SuperTanker
• Merv Adrian: SAP Promises Acceleration on a “Clear Path” – Will it Be Enough?
• Mark Smith: SAP Broadcasts New Enterprise Software and Applications Strategy
• Michael Krigsman: SAP ByDesign: Taming the Multi-Tenant Beast
• James Governor (@monkchips)’s post SAP: Out with the Old, Shrugging Off The Tag
• And a whole collection of articles from the Enterprise Irregulars and other bloggers

There was also a full virtual conference set up using the inXpo platform. I’ve used this platform several times in the past, when it has been used to recreate a “virtual show floor experience”, and I’ve found it to be a frustrating experience.

On this occasion, I think it was used much more successfully, to show the keynote presentations live and to host “ask an expert” sessions.

But crucially, there wasn’t any attempt to use the platforms closed communication tools – the backchannel was kept firmly in the open, where everybody could see it. There was a clear hashtag announced in advance (#sapsummit), and attendees were encouraged to use it.

It was clear in advance that Twitter would be the key backchannel for the event. The Enterprise Geeks did put together a public Google Wave for the event and encouraged others to help summarize content. But as Mark Madsen remarked:

“Tried to use Google Wave at #sapsummit, found that the UI is terrible, abandoned quickly”.

And — at least at the time of writing this — the resulting Wave is a lot closer to a messy email thread than a tidy wiki page.

Many of the invited attendees were Twitter users – in the Web 2.0 world, an active stream of Tweets is rapidly becoming considered essential part of doing business (at Le Web, technology evangelist Robert Scoble got very angry when he heard French Tech CEOs were too busy to have a Twitter account).

The #sapsummit conversation opened as people announced their travel plans, and quickly accelerated as the sessions opened on the first day. If you’re interested, you can see all of the tweets here in an 8Mb pdf document, from http://wthashtag.com/sapsummit.

Rather than just being a discussion forum for the audience, SAP employees used Twitter to clarify points made by the presenters, monitor feedback, and reacting it. And as the presenters came on stage, several of them mentioned that they had been watching the feed, and then addressed any points that had come up. As I tweeted early on:

“Looking at twitter feed from #sapsummit, I get the impression the “backchannel” is becoming almost the front channel…”

Jonathan Becher, SAP Executive VP of Marketing and host of the event gave his impressions in a blog post about the event.

“When I was asked to be the “official” blogger for the SAP Influencer Summit, I assumed that it would end up following a similar flow as I used for SAPPHIRE 09 earlier this year.  That is, I would write up some short observations after each of the morning’s keynotes and post them throughout the day.  Later in the evening, I would provide some more general observations about the event, with perhaps some on-site tidbits to share with those that couldn’t attend in person.

It didn’t turn out that way at all.

I wrote the initial post [about the Summit] during the relative calm of the night before the Influencer Summit.  I planned to write my second post during the break after Jim Snabe’s and Vishal Sikka’s morning keynotes.  Since we expected that the influencers to be very active on twitter, I also decided to monitor the #sapsummit hashtag live during the morning keynotes.  If specific issues came up, I could respond to them myself and, if anyone made any relevant comments, I could refer to them during my slots between the other presentations.

I knew that I was going to be busy but I wasn’t quite prepared for the firestorm of tweets… [not] just from the attendees in the room but also from those attending virtually. All of this meant I had no time to write the second blog entry…”

During the Q&A session with John Schwarz (left in the photo above), Jonathan also had an earphone and an audio feed that could give him feedback of audience reactions.

As I remarked on Twitter,

“#sapsummit is the first I’ve seen that comes close to using the possibilities of real-time Twitter”

And not just in real-time. The tweets themselves are a valuable resource that SAP can use to collect and study reactions to the presentations. As Vinnie Mirchandani (@DealArchitect) mused :

#sapsummit wondering if SAP or someone else is mining the huge tweet stream – lots of instant reaction from so many watchers

And he went on to hope that SAP would summarize the feedback as a follow up to the summit. One of the interesting opportunities in this area is sentiment analysis on top of Twitter, using SAP BusinessObjects Text Analytics – here’s a taste of what that could look like (demo data).

And a couple of days after the event, Jonathan Becher tweeted on progress:

Working on sentiment analysis for #sapsummit: OnDemand & ByD top mentioned terms, keyword with most positive mentions: BusinessObjects

Le Web

The annual Le Web conference in Paris is a much larger, general conference, focused mainly on consumer web technology. It also featured (excellent) live video-streaming of presentations (using USStream), and also had a very active Twitter channel (#leweb), with over 15,000 tweets from over 5,000 different people.

But interestingly enough, there was a much clearer separation of the presenters and the audience. I didn’t watch all the sessions, but the backchannel – although very active – seemed to stay firmly in the background. There was no obvious interaction between the people on stage and the people watching and tweeting – the closest I saw was the tweets that both Queen Rania, and Nathalie Kosciusko Morizet sent just before going on stage.

Even sessions all about Twitter, such as the Twitter Apps Panel didn’t actually use Twitter in any way as part of the presentation – when it came to Q&A, they used an open microphone in the session room.

The Future of Conferences

There’s been a lot of interest recently in Open Space meetings, Bar Camps, and other types of Unconference, where the audience takes a much larger role in the planning and delivery of conference materials. I suspect it’s going to be quite a long time before these take over from the more traditional conferences, at least enterprise software.

Both conferences included lots of real-time Twitter, and live video streaming. Attending conferences virtually becomes a real possibility – certainly compared to the hassle and expenses of actually being physically present. As Utku Can put it:

“Hello we’re the #leweb attendees. We’ve paid €1500 to sit together and check Twitter.”

Although, of course, it can never completely replace the real thing. As  Andy Bitterer put it:

“Attending an event virtually like this week’s #SAPsummit still not the same thing as being there. Miss the live interaction.”

I believe that in the future, more conferences will start to look like the SAP Summit, which is just part of a much longer ongoing dialog with a group of “stakeholders”, that also plays out through SAP’s Developer Network, and other regular meetings and communication, including platforms like Twitter.

Audiences are going to find it increasingly easy to get information before the event, and less patient with the rephrasing of messaging they’ve already heard before. The sessions are going to get more interactive. The audiences will want to ask more questions, earlier, and will expect their comments on Twitter or other channels to be included. Presenters will have to be more flexible, adapting their contents in real time to the audience.

Resources

• The PowerPoint twitter tools allow you to see live tweets embedded in your presentation, and let you “auto tweet” out your key points.

Another round of updates to the PowerPoint Twitter Tools, including:

• Auto-tweeting
• An additional feedback slide
• An option for secure internal use
• A customizable text-zooming tool
• The ability to set up values in advance (for example, to add the tools into a conference template)

To access all these tools, please go to the main download page: http://timoelliott.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/. Here’s some information about each of the new features:

PowerPoint AutoTweet

The PowerPoint AutoTweet functionality, available as a PowerPoint Add-in, lets you automatically update your twitter status during your presentation.

As you go through your slides in presentation mode, any text in your note pages between the tags [twitter] and [/twitter] will automatically be tweeted when you reach the appropriate slide.

The plugin uses Microsoft VBA (visual basic for applications), so is only supported in PowerPoint for Windows (the idea is based on similar functionality already available for Keynote on the Macintosh).

Checking the “Display success status of tweets” option will show a dialog box during the presentation, telling you whether the tweet was successful or not. It will close automatically after a second or so (the actual time may vary depending on the vagaries of Windows processing).

You can use the twitter feed to reinforce the points you are making in your presentation, or ask the audience questions related to your content, and include a feedback slide later in the presentation to review the audience replies.

New Feedback Slide

Here’s another feedback slide tool for high-tweet locations (web 2.0 conferences, etc.), showing twice as many tweets as the original. Like the original, it auto-refreshes every 30 seconds and supports pagination and custom feeds (for example using a service like http://TidyTweet.com for a moderated feed, or any other atom-based feed).

Secure Internal Use

What if you would like to use the PowerPoint Twitter Tools for an internal meeting, but don’t want to blast your critique of executive strategy over the internet?

One option is to use the open-source microblogging platform from Status.Net (motto: “Your life and your business are your own. Take control of your status.”). You can see an example of this product in action at www.identi.ca

To use the product, you’d need to install a server inside your organization, invite your employees to register, and then use a custom feed such as:

http://yourinternalserver:1088/api/statusnet/tags/timeline/thetagyouwanttofollow.atom

The two feedback slides and the ticker bar all support the use of custom feeds. Unfortunately, some of the status.net feeds don’t include the avatars link, so you only get the text updates using this method (e.g. see the screen shot below using the public feed for the “enterprise20” tag from identi.ca: http://identi.ca/api/statusnet/tags/timeline/enterprise20.atom).

Zoom Text Tool

This tool doesn’t connect directly to twitter just yet, but it’s a nice graphic effect that you can customize with your own words. Here’s a glimpse of what it looks like (this text moves towards the viewer, and you can click on values to move them to the center)

Support for Predefined Values and Templates

Do any of these apply to you?

• You’re tired of entering the same keyword values each time you open the presentation?
• You have a technically-challenged manager, and you need to set the values in advance?
• You’re scared that the audience might – gasp — see the mouse on the screen? (this is a surprisingly common fear among conference organizers)
• You’d like to set up a conference template for others to uses

The answer to all these is to use the setup variables, now supported by most of the tools. To set variables in advance, simple right-click the tool in PowerPoint and add them to the end of the movie name. Here’s a quick list of the variables available:

• “keyword=yoursearchterm” (use %20 instead of a space if you need two words)
• “locked=1” hides the bar for the search term, effectively “locking” it to whatever you’ve pre-set
• “votes=10” to set the maximum number of votes
• “customfeed=1” to enable a custom feed
• “customfeedurl=http://yourcustomfeedurl” to set the value of the custom feed
• “days=4” increases the number of days votes are valid for
• “percentageorvalue=1” to show percentage by default (0 to show value)
• “choice1=YourChoiceText” for the hover-over text on the voting charts (choice1 through choice6, as appropriate – and use %20 instead of a space if you need two words)

For example, if you wanted to set up the feedback slide so that it automatically opened with a search for the tag “#sap”, you can simply right-mouse click on the movie, and add “?keyword=#sap” to the end of the “Movie” Parameter (note that in theory you should use URLencoding of values, e.g. %23 instead of #, but it seems to work anyway)

And here’s an example of the text to add in order to get a locked-down, custom moderated feed:
“?locked=1&customfeed=1&customfeedurl=http://timoelliott.tidytweet.com/SAPWeb20.atom”

Here’s the result – note that the search term can no longer be changed:

To see which values are valid for which movies, click on the “embed” button, and view the options for the embedded HTML:

To access all these tools, please go to the main download page: http://timoelliott.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/

It’s a sunny Fall morning in San Francisco, and Steve Wylie of TechWeb kicked off the first San Francisco version of the E2.0 event, talking about the changes he’s seen over the last few years. In particular, he pointed to the the rich case studies, larger vendors, and dedicated service providers that are present at today’s event as evidence of the industry’s increasing maturity.

Tammy Erickson, President of nGenera Innovation, started her keynote with a prediction that this year will be seen as the “ah-ha” year, when organizations really started implementing Enterprise 2.0 technology. She explained that, as with every new technology, the early focus is on the technology itself, but it will ultimately lead to big changes in the the way organizations work. For example, the invention of the telephone enabled management at a distance, and the creation of head offices far from the plants and factories.

She went on to outline the changes she sees in the future:

Over the last 100 years, we’ve developed organizations perfectly adapted to prior challenges – but not the challenges of the future. The icons of the future will be those organizations that have harnessed the power of Enterprise 2.0 technology in organizations, bringing information together in powerful new ways.

The organizational structures of today’s organizations are not adapted to the new methods. We need more flexible team structures that have ability to effect change. And beyond the structures, there are a series of deeply-embedded assumptions that need to be surfaced and addressed.

For example, there’s assumed to be a tradeoff between loyalty, and protection and care. Most corporate policies – such as pension plans and promotions – are based on this. But we know as employees that we can no longer companies to protect us – but as yet, there’s no replacement pact yet to take its place. Another assumption has been about individual autonomy – the notion that “you do your job, I do mind”, and that peers don’t have any right or ability to comment on my work.

Today, almost all the unwritten rules in our organizations actually discourage collaborative behavior, and this has to change. The future will see a move to more of a “Plug and Pay” structure, where employees can come in for specific roles for which they are best qualified.

nGenera’s research shows there are ten behaviors that enable collaborative capacity:

• Highly engaged, committed participants
• Trust-based relationships
• Networking opportunities
• Selection, promotion and training practices based on collaboration
• Organizational philosophy supporting a “community of adults”
• Executives who create a “gift culture”
• Leaders with both task- and relationship-management skills
• Productive and efficient behaviors and processes
• Clearly defined individual roles and responsibilities
• Important, challenging tasks

Executive concerns about Enterprise 2.0 are clearly diminishing – fewer people consider it a luxury, or simply a sop to Gen-Y employees. Organizations are realizing that these are business tools that have substantial implications for the way we carry out activities.

But there’s still confusion – we lump together a very wide range of different activities and technologies under the “Enterprise 2.0” banner. The reality is that Enterprise 2.0 can take many forms – and it’s not always worth it.

So what do people mean? There are typically “ten collaborative intents”:

1. Connect previously-unrelated ideas
2. Access untapped people or expertise
3. Distribute work or risk
4. Co-create
5. Detect emerging patterns or trends
6. Pool judgments
7. Determine group-wide preferences
8. Air and debate multiple views
9. Influence views or norms
10. Coordinate in time and space

One of the biggest future challenges is engagement: you can’t make anyone collaborate. You don’t really know if I’m really putting forth my “best effort”. So the way we’ve learned to manage, by setting directions and controls, and monitoring success – has to change. The new management challenge will be engagement: the job of a manager is to help employees want to share, to collaborate. This requires a very “authentic” organization – one that is true to “what it means to work here”

Tammy outlined four common corporate positions today:

• Technology-led
• Culture-based
• Executive-led
• Skunk works

In each of these cases, the approach isn’t yet balanced – one of the elements dominates over the others (strategy, structure, culture, technology, or engagement) – or, in the skunkworks case, there’s only some development in each area..

Microsoft’s presentation featured a mock “social speed date”  between Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management at Microsoft, and Alina Fu, SharePoint product manager.

Andrew McAfee, first coined the term Enterprise 2.0 in an article in 2006, and literally wrote the book about the subject.

He agreed with Tammy that there’s been a sea-change in interest in Enterprise 2.0, and that executives have moved from skepticism to awareness, or resignation, or even some enthusiasm. But there are also some danger signs – hence the title of his presentation: “We have the opportunity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory""

First, the evidence that Enterprise 2.0 is thriving. Andrew’s favorite case study comes from the intelligence community: “if they can do it – with a strong “need to know” tradition of information sharing – then anybody can.” When he asked a member of that community what had
changed, they said:

“Philosophy used to be that if we shared information too much, people would die. But after 9/11, we realized that if we DON’T share information enough, people could die.”

Andrew pointed to the growth of case studies and organizations such as the Enterprise 2.0 adoption council as an example of the increasing maturity of the industry (plus, they have great swag!)

Andrew quoted from various studies including one from McKinsey called “how companies are benefiting from Web 2.0”, which showed big increases in access to knowledge, to internal experts, employee satisfaction, increasing innovation, and customer satisfaction.

What are the dangers? What could we do to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Here are some common mistakes Andrew sees:

Declaring war on the enterprise. As Andrew points out, this is a really bad sales pitch – if the goal is to make the executives go away, they are unlikely to sign up for the plan. Plus, and more importantly, it’s flat-out empirically wrong – there’s still need for some hierarchy, there’s still need for management. To illustrate the point, Andrew pointed to a news story from the satirical journal, the Onion — “Marrxist’s apartment a microscosm of why Marxism doesn’t work”.

Allow walled gardens to flourish. Create mutually inaccessible silos of information. The web works because there’s “a” web, not lots of different webs. He illustrated this with a picture of walled fields from Normandy France.

Accentuate the negative. The risks are manageable, and shouldn’t be ignored, but shouldn’t stop things going forward. For example, one organization implemented a “flag” that could be set to show a potential problem – but so far it’s never been used.

Try to replace email. We’re not going to replace email any time soon. It works well for a lot of people, and in particular, senior decision-makers are happy with it, especially the “one stop shop” aspect of the inbox.

Fall in love with features. Users don’t want more bells and whistles. We have a tendency to cram in more features – but this doesn’t make it any easier to use. The phrase to retain is “what’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?”

Overuse the word “social”. The word is technically accurate, but “I’ve rarely come across a work that has so many negative associations for managers” – it sounds like “technology to organize social hour” (cue picture of Woodstock: chaos, despair, etc.)

In the final keynote of the morning, Rob Tarkoff, VP and General Manager, Business Productivity Solutions for Adobe explained that enterprise software is failing because of the lack of attractive interfaces, and showed an example of healthcare workflow using Adobe’s solutions.

I’ve posted a new set of tools to the PowerPoint Twitter Tools pages. The new features include:

• Moderated tweets
• New tool to tweet directly from PowerPoint
• New “mood meter” tool
• New voting pie chart tool

Moderated Tweets and New Feedback Slide Options

Are you scared of your audience? Me neither. But when I recently asked several senior executives if they were interested in using the PowerPoint Twitter Tools in their conference presentations, the reaction was identical, three times in a row: “Wow, that’s a great idea!”, followed by “but maybe not this time…”

The biggest fear was that people would tweet something inappropriate, and it would appear during the presentation (profanity, swear words, “your presentation sucks”, etc.).

I think the fear is overblown (if anything, putting the “backchannel” on the front screen helps make it more civilized, and if it’s in the twitter feed much of your audience is already seeing it), but to keep the sensitive exec types happy, I’ve introduced the ability to have moderated tweets, thanks to a new “custom feed” option, and the services of TidyTweet.com.

To use the service, you first sign up for a free account at the beta TidyTweet site, which gives you full control over the twitter stream you’d like to show – you can automatically filter out profanities, users you don’t like, likely spam accounts, etc., and even decide manually on a tweet-by-tweet basis what gets shown.

Once you’ve set up your account, you can use the new “custom feed” option at the bottom of the screen, and paste in the URL of the RSS feed provided by TidyTweet (supported in both the feedback slide, and the twitter ticker bar).

Now only the moderated tweets will appear in your slides (if you’ve chosen manual filtering, you’ll need a colleague in the room who can log into the TidyTweet site and moderate as you present). But remember, the filtering only works for the slides, not for any audience members who are on Twitter directly – if you decide not to show a “tough tweet”, the presenter may be only one who’s not aware of it.

To be fair, there are always some bad apples out there. Here are some of the good reasons I can think of for moderating a big keynote:

• Attention-seekers who might revel in the notoriety of disrupting a big keynote
• Spam artists that jump onto any trending topic
• Consultants and others than can’t resist using the forum to pretend to ask a question while actually pitching their products/expertise
• Way-off-topic posts that sneak through if you have an ambiguous search term (e.g. “#sap” misses a lot of SAP-related content, while “sap” has a lot of junk)

Also, note that the custom feed doesn’t have to be used only for moderation – it can be any RSS feed you like (although certain aspects of the slide might not be supported, such as the people icons). For example, you can use it for more advanced Twitter options, using all the advanced search operators, such as the ability to combine tweets from several different people (e.g. http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?from=businessobjects+OR+sapnetwork+OR+_sapcrm)

In addition, there are several other new features in the feedback slide:

• The texts now automatically highlights the search term, and you can click directly on any mentioned links to open them in a new web page.
• The addition of the “page” indicator in the lower left makes it easy to step back through older tweets.
• A new “locked” option is now available for advanced users who want to embed the feedback slide into presentations with the options preset and invisible (for example, in order to provide it as a standard slide for a conference template, locked to the conference hashtag). More instructions will be available shortly in the “advanced” section of the Instructions page.

Tweet Directly from PowerPoint

I’m not sure what circumstances a presenter might want to do this, but it was a request, so here it is… To use it, simply add the bar to your slides, fill in the message to tweet and press “send tweet”.

PowerPoint will prompt you to enter your username and password for twitter, then send off your message.

Note that the bar uses only “basic authentication”, which means some restrictions apply:

1. The bar’s .swf file must be in the same local directory as your presentation (unlike the other tools, which are automatically pulled from the SAPWeb20.com site as necessary).
2. Whether or not you can use it depends on your computer setup: if you get a #2048 error, your PC or PowerPoint security settings are preventing the login box from appearing (I’ll provide more information on how to fix this once I figure out what’s happening).

PowerPoint Twitter Mood Meter

I designed this tool to accompany debates, or presentations designed to persuade the audience.

It’s a variation on twitter voting – the audience can signal their agreement or disagreement with a proposition, and you can track the sentiment of the audience in real time.

For example: you ask the audience a question (e.g. “does innovation come from small companies, or large companies?”, or “will Web 2.0 transform organizations?”)

In the course of your presentation, the audience can tweet either “@votebytweet warmer myuniqueid” to indicate that that they agree, or “@votebytweet colder myuniqueid” if they disagree, and the indicator in the bar will move to the right (warmer, redder) or to the left (colder, bluer).

Because the bar shows the average of the last n tweets (10 by default), you can use it to track how persuasive you are being with your arguments, as the bar tracks the current “mood”.

As with the ticker bar, this should be installed in the powerpoint slide master if you want to use it across slides. See http://timoelliott.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/instructions for more details

New Pie Chart Voting

A new variation of the voting tool is available, showing a pie chart. Options allow you to customize the text of the options shown next to the chart.

Enjoy the tools, and please keep the feedback coming!

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 demo team and worked perfectly during a large internal kickoff.

The system worked, but it was cumbersome: it required server code that broke when my service provider upgraded my hosting service, not many people were equipped with the suitable phones, it was awkward to type out the addresses, and letting somebody else use it meant setting up a separate system.

For all these reasons, the prototype just sat on one of my ancient “to do” lists – until now. Exactly two weeks ago, I suddenly realized that the world had moved on, and that the arrival of Twitter had provided me with a perfect opportunity to revive the prototype.

Twitter provides a service that’s available everywhere, for free, on just about any device (even older phones, using SMS), and lots of people (at least in the Web 2.0 world) are already using it during presentations. And texting/accessing web pages is much easier than it used to be with a new generation of smarter, easier-to-use phones (e.g. there’s a great TweetDeck for the iPhone). So I set out to figure out how to link it to Xcelsius and put the result into a PowerPoint presentation

I looked at the search API, which turned out to be perfect for the job: a simple URL call, no ID required, which returns an RSS/XML results. I used the Xcelsius Excel XML Map integration to grab the data, added a ticker bar and a few buttons, and hey presto!, I had a basic prototype in just a few minutes.

I’ve dabbled in the past in some Flash scripting, but I’m completely out of my depth when it comes to the latest ActionScript 3.0 object-oriented code. Xcelsius made it easy for even somebody like me – a slightly geeky marketing guy – to build these tools without using anything more complicated than some Excel formulas.

I tried it out at a conference, and the feedback was very positive, so I shared it with some friends within SAP, added voting, and then decided to release it publicly on my other site, http://timoelliott.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools

The prototypes are in “beta”, ready for testing. There are currently three tools — but others are in production!

• PowerPoint Twitter ticker bar
• PowerPoint Twitter feedback slide
• PowerPoint Twitter voting

Display a real-time twitter Bar at the bottom of each slide

The twitter ticker bar sits at the bottom of each PowerPoint slide, displaying the ten latest tweets that contain a particular search string (e.g. “#businessobjects”). Status is maintained across slide transitions.

Display a feedback slide with questions and comments from Twitter

Replace your standard Q&A slide with a twitter-powered version!

Real-time voting over Twitter

Let the audience vote on choices by sending a tweet! Supports up to six choices, and up to 100 votes.

When you launch the PowerPoint file containing the tools, it calls the Xcelsius .swf files from the sapweb20.com site – so that I can easily update them with new features, and people will automatically get the latest versions.

You can follow news about the project on http://twitter.com/sapweb20

Feedback so far has been great, and downloads from the site are sky-rocketing…

And many, many others…

Go to the Powerpoint Twitter Tools page to download the tools!

In today’s web 2.0 world, sometimes the presenter on stage is the only one who doesn’t know what the audience is thinking – because everybody else is viewing the Twitter stream.

These new prototypes fix that problem, allowing you to give presentations in web 2.0 style, with the comments from your audience appearing directly on the screen, in real time, during your presentation!

Based on the SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius dashboarding technology, but completely free to use, the prototypes can be embedded in any PowerPoint slide deck, and provide a real-time Twitter ticker feed, a Twitter feedback slide, and a set of Twitter voting templates.

Go to the Powerpoint Twitter Tools page on this web site to download the tools!