Next Wednesday, February 15th, from 3pm to  4.30pm PST, I will be moderating a panel on the theme of Products+Social=Better Products as part of Social Media Day at SAP Palo Alto (and Online).

We’ll discussing how to make better products thanks to social techniques. Please join us! You can register here and the conference hashtags are #SMW12 and #SAP.

Panel Session Outline

Here’s the outline of the panel session:

• 3:00-3:15 Key themes and Introductions:
• 3:15-3:35 Improving products through social techniques:
• 3:35-3:55 Creating social-enabled products:
• 3:55-4:15 Creating new products on top of social networks:
• 4:15-4:30 Wrap-up and final thoughts

These times are just a guideline – we’ll go where the conversation takes us. We will be encouraging the audience (both local and online) to tweet questions and comments, and I will pass them on to the panelists.

Here are some more details about the panelists and the show:

Meet the Panelists

In alphabetic order, here are the participants of the panel – click on their name to see their profile on twitter.

	David Brockington is a solution manager responsible for SAP’s new collaboration solution, SAP StreamWork. He has been an evangelist and thought leader within SAP on social business topics. Previously, he spent 10 years in various product management roles helping grow SAP Business Objects Enterprise from its very first iteration to the number one market leading business intelligence solution.
	Timo Elliott is a 20-year veteran of SAP BusinessObjects, and has spent the last quarter-century working with customers around the world on information strategy. He works closely with SAP research and innovation centers around the world to evangelize new technology prototypes.His popular Business Analyticsblog tracks innovation in analytics and social media, including topics such as augmented corporate reality, collaborative decision-making, and social network analysis.His PowerPoint Twitter Tools lets presenters see and react to tweets in real time, embedded directly within their slides. Elliott presents regularly to IT and business audiences at international conferences, on subjects such as why BI projects fail and what to do about it, and the intersection of BI and enterprise 2.0
	Ross Mayfield is the Vice President of Business Development at SlideShare, developing strategic partnerships and helping organizations engage with the world’s largest professional sharing community.He is also currently Chairman & Co-founder of Socialtext, the Enterprise Social Software pioneer, and was the founding CEO. Previously, Mayfield Co-founded and served as President of RateXchange, a publicly traded B2B commodity exchange for telecommunications.Mayfield is a former advisor to the Office of the President of Estonia and began his career in the non-profit sector. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California at Los Angeles and completed the Management Development for Entrepreneurs (MDE) program of the Anderson School of Business
	Kuhan Milroy is Director of Social Business Innovation, SAP Community Network at SAP. By bringing the social element to innovation at SAP, Kuhan is responsible for transforming the way SAP and customers, partners, and consumers innovate together to help shape the future of SAP’s products and solutions and more importantly the businesses, industries and markets the products serve. He manages initiatives surrounding the community and bringing a social approach to how SAP innovates, and researches how SAP can expand beyond small group to mass users for ideas and innovation.
	Lisa Joy Rosner is the Chief Marketing Officer at NetBase, where she works with the largest brands in the world—including Coca-Cola, Kraft and HP—as they change their approach to understanding consumers’ desires.Ms. Rosner is a tenured marketing executive in Silicon Valley, who is known for her creative and educational marketing approach. Before joining NetBase, she was an e-commerce expert, having served as vice president of Worldwide Marketing at BroadVision Inc. and vice president of Marketing at MyBuys, where she worked with such companies as Sears, Wal-Mart and Circuit City.Prior to that, Ms. Rosner worked in the data warehouse market at Brio, DecisionPoint and Oracle. Lisa Joy has served on the marketing advisory board for the Silicon Valley Red Cross and the Content Committee of Shop.org, the AMA and Benchmark. She was named the Gold winner of the Great Minds Award by the ARF in 2011. Ms. Rosner received a bachelor’s degree (sum cum laude) in English literature from the University of Maryland. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa
	Nicholas Webb is one of the countries top thought leaders in the area of innovation. His books include The Innovation Playbook, The Digital Innovation Playbook, and The Innovation Superstar Workbook.As a Senior Partner at Lassen Innovation he helps some of the best companies in the world drive innovation through improved customer insights and true innovation best practice.

As part of this year’s Social Media Week, I’ll be hosting one of the sessions at a free one-day event held at SAP Palo Alto on February 15th. It’s entitled “Social Business: Designing Social into Products”, and I will be accompanied by a star-studded lineup of guests: meet the panelists. Please join us by registering for the session or join via online streaming on the SAP Facebook page, and the hashtag for the event is #SMW12

In this post, I’d like to share some ideas about why I believe that there are now fantastic new opportunities to improve all kinds of products using social media techniques.

PLEASE GIVE YOUR FEEDBACK. This blog post and the session I’ll be hosting are also “products”, in a sense, and I’d like to use the techniques outlined below to make them as good as possible: please post your feedback and any answers you have to the questions below, or suggestions for great panelists, and I’ll use that feedback to improve the session above!

Introduction

I believe that we’re still in the era of a “horseless carriage” version of social media: we added a motor, but kept the rest of the carriage.

In other words, while we understand how the new technologies work, we’re still tending to bolt the new social techniques onto our existing processes, rather than fundamentally rethinking those processes in the light of the new opportunities.

This tends to be true of all new technologies, of course. But for some reason there seems to be a bigger gap than usual – perhaps it is because the “trees” are so obvious (social media analytics, enterprise collaboration, etc.) that they tend to obscure the “wood”: the opportunity to sweep away existing bottlenecks in our business processes.

Social media is too often a marginal activity that people are happy to leave up to a dedicated team elsewhere in the organization, rather than embedded in everything we do. This post looks in particular at how social media techniques can be applied to the process of product creation.

Social / Product Trends

Why introduce something new? Why can’t we just keep doing what we’re doing today? Let’s start with some of the background trends:

Transparency: Whether you have a great product or an awful one, prospective customers can get the information they need directly from unbiased peers. This means that traditional product sales and marketing is being marginalized, and that core product quality becomes even more fundamental.

A great product – one that customers are delighted to own and use, and talk about to other people – can now take off at lighting speed, with almost no promotional cost. And news about product problems or poor service can spread even faster. The good news is that product creators can communicate with their customers more cheaply than ever: we may be naked, but we have a megaphone. It has to be used wisely. Honesty and credibility are essential values when talking about your products to the market.

Direct Contact With Customers: In large product organizations, there’s often a big communications gap between the people creating products and the people using them. The creators and designers of software, for example, have typically had to rely on other people to research the needs of potential users. The researchers then pass on that information in the form of “consumer profiles”, “personas”, or “ethnographic research”, which is used as a basis for creation. Something often gets lost in the translation, but is often seen as the only feasible way to operate.

Software engineers (for example), frustrated by this limited visibility, complain how hard it is to get access to customers, who are often protectively fenced off by sales teams (perhaps worried that developers might let too much of the truth slip out about product bugs or delays).

The advances of social media means all this can now change: vast numbers of potential users are only a few mouse-clicks away, participating in industry forums, complaining about alternative products, or talking about their favorite features.

Network Leverage: There are now socially-enabled running shoes, socially-enabled cameras, socially-enabled toys, and socially-enabled enterprise software. Almost any product can now be “social”, and hence experience network effects that may outweigh the other product features.

Extended Ecosystems:By embedding more use of social techniques into product creation and selling, we’re inevitably creating more complex, interactive networks of ecosystems around our products, with customers, partners, suppliers of social networking, etc.

How do “Social” and “Product” Interact?

I believe there are three main ways in which we can create new or better products through social media techniques. It’s clear, however, that there is still a lot to learn before these techniques become commonplace — in each section, I’ve added some of the questions I believe need to be addressed: again, any feedback you have is more than welcome!

Social-improved products

First and most obviously we can use social media to improve the way we create existing products. New techniques include:

Social Research. It’s now easy to find data about new opportunities, such as customers complaining about business problems or competitor products. And it’s easy to get customer feedback on problems with our own products. Given the potential for better products, I believe we should be investing extensively in these new areas. Questions:

• What valuable data is available now that wasn’t before?
• What are the costs and opportunities associated with these new techniques?
• How much time should product creators spend communicating with communities vs. creating products?
• How do systems have to change to ensure that this type of research is consistently integrated into the product creation process?
• What are the real-life limitations of such research? i.e. what kinds of important data can we not get with these processes?
• What social research tools can we build into the product experience? (e.g. making it easy to invite others when using the product, and tracking success, or an online game maker tracking the price of different virtual weapons)

Ideation. One of the most painful parts of any product creation process is prioritization – we can never make a “perfect” product. There will always be some compromise in terms of functionality or cost. New ideation platforms, such as SAP’s Idea Place offer an opportunity to ask customers and potential customers to give their feedback directly on possible new features and what compromises to make.

These opportunities are not limited to software or technical products – consumer goods companies can run surveys on online forums, authors can ask online discussion boards for plot ideas for their next book, etc. This gets us closer to “crowdsourcing” the creation and improvement of products. Questions:

• When is ideation not appropriate?
• What types of products and features work best for ideation?
• How can we motivate our customers and prospects to participate?
• What level of transparency is appropriate?
• How do we handle rejection of non-chosen products and features?
• What are the dangers of competitors seeing the data, or gaming the results?

Social Prototyping. Basic ideation isn’t enough. I’m sure we can all think of an experience where we didn’t realize we wanted or needed a particular product until we tried it out. Product designers, after all, can have great ideas of their own, based on their deep market knowledge. One key problem today is that somebody in a company may what they believe is a fantastic idea for a new and different product. But in order to pursue the product, they need resources and permission of several layers of management.

Those managers may not have any real frame of reference to determine if the new product is a real opportunity or not, and may not be incented to take any risks. This can result in some combination of dissatisfied product creators (if the idea is rejected), wasted time (slow decision-making at each level ), or wasted money (if the idea is accepted, but the product fails). But using social media, it’s now much easier to create fast prototypes (mockups, concept version, wireframes, etc.), and then make them available to customers for testing and feedback.

The benefit is that it’s much clearer whether a product really does appeal to customers or not, helping the prioritization process. The car industry has long done this with “concept cars”, and SAP has tested these techniques with through its SAP Research Prototyping group. Ideas such as integration with Google Maps were shown to be extremely popular (and so were rushed into production) while some ideas weren’t interesting (and the person proposing the new feature had a learning experience). Questions:

• How can we introduce more extensive prototyping and social feedback into our product creation processes?
• How do we decide if a prototype is successful enough to productize?
• Are there any other benefits to this type of process? (marketing, thought leadership, etc.?)
• Does this approach cost more or less than existing methods?

Social-Enabled Products

We can integrate social media into products to improve their usefulness or effectiveness. Games you can play with other people in your social network are more interesting that games you play on your own. Our devices are increasingly wired to be able to share information – you can buy applications and shoes that share information socially on platforms such as RunKeeper. Runners can use the social-enabled devices to share data with a coach, boast of their achievements, embarrass themselves into improving their times, or let relatives track where they are during a marathon. And if you’re logged into Facebook when you visit the site, it will tell you which of your friends are already using the products.

Hybrid cars can keep track of your fuel consumption, so you can compete with your friends about who is the most sustainable driver. Restaurant guides can give us information based on the ratings given by our friends and other restaurants we’ve visited on foursquare or “liked” on Facebook. Enterprise software vendors can build collaboration into existing business applications, letting people apply social media techniques to supply chain collaboration or track the progress of sales deals. Even Lego is becoming social.

• What are your favorite examples of social-enabled products?
• How important is social enablement compared to other features of a product?
• Do product creators have to be aware of new power-players in the social eco-system?
• What other products should include social but don’t today?
• What about the limits of social privacy when using such products?

New Products On Top of Social

There are opportunities to create new products “on top of” social networks, or as by-products of them. Companies such as LinkedIn have been able to create new “products” based on the data gathered in their networks, such as “Talent Match” or “Jobs You May Be Interested In”. New tools could help improve the success or failure of a big merger by analyzing the different social networks within the two organizations over time. Companies could develop more sophisticated “friends and family” offers for their products. Car-sharing services could leverage social networks to improve usage rates.

• What are some other good examples of leveraging social networks to create new products and services?
• Is this something that the rest of us even need to think about?

Conclusion

We’re a long way from “build it and they will come”, but we’re not yet at “come build it with us”. I look forward to your feedback!

Interested in Social Media? (and everybody should be, because these techniques are changing EVERY business process, not just marketing). Come and join us!

As part of this year’s Social Media Week, SAP Palo Alto will be hosting a free, day-long non-SAP-focused event on Wednesday, February 15th with a glittering array of industry experts discussing a variety of key social topics:

Just some of the participants: Maggie Fox, CEO of Social Media Group | Ray Wang, CEO of Constellations Research|Jonathan Becher, Chief Marketing Officer of SAP | Barbara Holzapfel, SVP & Managing Director of SAP | Rachel Happe of The Community Roundtable | Srini Tanikella, SCN community member |Kimarie Mathews of Wells Fargo | Deirdre Walsh of Jive Software | Brian Ellefritz, SAP Social Media Strategic Services | Lisa Joy Rosner, Chief Marketing Officer at NetBase |Dave Brockington, Product Marketing & Strategy, StreamWork | Me!

You are invited to attend on-site if you’re in Silicon Valley, but the sessions will also be available through online streaming on the SAP Facebook page.

I’ll be hosting the last session of the day, on Social Media and Products – more details about that session in a separate blog post: Social+Product=Better Products.

Please join us! Click on the links below to find out more and to sign up to attend one or more of the sessions (sorry, to attend the whole day, you have to sign up four times…)

SAP Social Media Day, Wednesday, February 15th

Location: 3410 Hillview Avenue, Building 1 Café, Palo Alto

Hashtags #SMW12 #SAP, and find event-related blogs on the SAP Community Network and SocialMediaWeek.org.

Here’s a recording of a World Tour keynote presentation (it happens to be from Belgrade, Serbia, but I did similar presentations in several different regions). It covers how companies can build competitive advantage through customer intimacy, product leadership, category renewal, and operational excellence, using examples from SAP’s customers.

You can download the slides in either PowerPoint or pdf format.

In a previous post, I talked about the “illusory superiority” effect, and how it blinds people to the fact that, on average, it’s unlikely that they use data better than their competitors.

Guess what? It turns out that it applies to governance, risk, and compliance, too. Here are some figures from another Economist Intelligence Unit Survey, “Ascending the Maturity Curve, Effective Management of Enterprise Risk and Compliance”:

We can see that of those who haven’t experienced failures, only 1% believe that they are worse than average – and even among companies that have experienced failures, fully 87% believe that they are as least as good as their peers.  Unless the Economist has stumbled across a particularly great group of companies to study, it seems clear that most organizations are overestimating the quality of their GRC practices, and hence underestimating the real risks they are running…

There’s also data in the report that seems to indicate that the finance function is the mostly likely to be blindsided – as you can see in the chart below, they are far more likely to say that there was no significant risk or compliance failure in the past three years. Since this is not a group known for their exuberant optimism, it’s likely that they simply didn’t know about the risks run by the other teams…

In conclusion, if you’re in the finance function, and responsible for your GRC practices, it’s likely that you should be investing more than you are today. For more information, check out SAP’s GRC products, and Norman Mark’s blog on Governance, Risk Management, and Internal Audit.

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.”

I’ll be an official “social ambassador” for analytics at SAPPHIRE NOW from Madrid next week. This blog attempts to summarize the main analytics-related activities during the two days of SAPPHIRE NOW – but note that this year, SAPPHIRE NOW attendees also have access to all SAP TechEd sessions that are going on at the same time, making it even harder than usual to choose from the dizzying array of possible sessions (the SAP TechEd sessions are technology-focused, and include more networking sessions with IT peers, while the SAPPHIRE NOW sessions focus on the business aspects and include more customer sessions).

For the rest of this post, I’ll focus on SAPPHIRE NOW. There are four main campuses, staffed by SAP experts available to answer any questions you may have:

For this post, I’ll concentrate on activities in the Business Analytics Campus, but note that if you’re interested in mobile BI, analytics integrated with SAP, or the latest in in-memory systems, you may also want to check out the contents of the other three campus areas (as an example, “How Pfizer Uses Mobile Business Analytics from SAP” is on Wednesday afternoon). There are also analytics-related, “TED-like” sessions in the Spotlight theater (which will be recorded and available after the event)

Business Analytics Campus

There are an amazing 87 analytics-related, information-packed sessions scheduled over the two days – use the personal agenda builder to pick which ones you’d like to attend, and leave time to visit the analytics discussion tables (meet and discuss with SAP experts), the demo pods (working versions of the latest analytics software, including HANA, BusinessObjects 4.0, and EPM 10), and the exhibitor area.

Personally, I’ll be concentrating on the customer presentations and panel sessions, so here’s a recap of them below – to see the scheduled times, see the full list of sessions later in this post.

Customer Presentations

Bowers and Wilkins: Transform how you do business by “mobilizing” decision making. Mobile BI is the new reality for companies who want to transform how they make decisions today.  Learn how customers are making fact-based decisions wherever they are with built-for-mobile BI.  Discover how you can impact your business’ performance with reporting, analysis, dashboards and visualization delivered real-time to any mobile device.

Novartis: Our journey to Integrated Business Intelligence. Learn how Novartis Pharma is consolidating its BI environment worldwide from seven instances of SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) and transitioning to one single source of truth, introducing SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 and SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 7.5 to enable a complete new level in business decision making capabilities.

Altron: Meet Growing Information Demands with SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 Innovations. Due to business conditions and increasing demands for information access, BI teams now face steeper requirements for information integrity, burgeoning data volumes, and demand for analytics across lines of business. Meanwhile end users clamor for simpler, faster mobile access to information. Hear how innovations in SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 can help.

Charite: Turn “Big Data” into Business Value with Real-Time BI. Increasing expectations of BI users for access to big data, coupled with rapid response times and rising need for intuitive end-user experience, put pressure on BI professionals. Hear how Charite, a large German university hospital supports its operations and research demands by leveraging in-memory technology with SAP BusinessObjects solutions.

All for One Drives Rapid Decisions and Project Delivery with SAP StreamWork. Learn about All for One Midmarket AG, a one-stop shop for outsourcing services and application management. Hear how the company increased customer interaction, streamlined its project management and delivery, and enabled faster, improved decision making with the cloud-based social collaboration solution, the SAP StreamWork application.

Tecan: Automating Internal Controls with SAP BusinessObjects GRC Solution. Hear how Tecan, a leader in life sciences supply, has implemented an automated internal controls system with SAP BusinessObjects governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions. Learn how Tecan has revolutionized manual processes and achieved stronger and more reliable controls with the SAP BusinessObjects Process Control 10.0 application.

Why Medtronic Chose SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver BW to Stay Competitive. Hear Medtronic Inc., a global leader in medical technology, explain its recent deployment of the SAP HANA platform and the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) component. Learn how SAP HANA allows the company to better analyze business operations, lower total cost of ownership, and speed time to market. – Implementation/Technology Partner: Cisco

How Pfizer Uses Mobile Business Analytics from SAP. This discussion will help you learn firsthand how Pfizer Inc. embraced mobile analytics as part of its enterprise strategy. Hear about what the company learned and where it’s going. (Mobility Campus)

BASF: Secure Supply Chain with SAP BusinessObjects Global Trade Services. BASF runs the SAP BusinessObjects Global Trade Services application, including global trade compliance and trade preference management. The company recently implemented new features, including Excise Movement and Control System and integration to the SAP Event Management application, to proactively monitor and manage a first-class supply chain.

Integrated Financial Reporting and Planning with SAP Software at Statoil. Hear about Statoil’s successful integrated financial reporting and group planning. The company will share its implementation experiences with business intelligence and the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation application, which helped increase quality and efficiency in producing internal and external financial reports.

Why AOK Chose SAP HANA for Real-Time Analytics. Hear why Allgemeinen Orts Krankenkassen (AOK), the largest health insurance organization in Germany, chose the SAP HANA platform for real-time analytics and data warehousing. Learn about AOK’s short- and long-term use cases for SAP HANA, including plans to supercharge the organization’s landscape for the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse component. – Implementation/Technology Partner: Dell

Get the Inside Story on Deloitte’s Implementation of SAP HANA. Find out how key stakeholder support was gained and how a large amount of structured and unstructured data was deployed at Deloitte. See the impact the SAP HANA platform has on the company’s front-end reports, including a reduction in data load time from 48 hours to 12 minutes and report run time from 30 minutes to milliseconds. – Implementation/Technology Partner: Deloitte

Logista: Managing Access Risk with SAP BusinessObjects Access Control. Hear how Logista, a leading logistics group, uses the SAP BusinessObjects Access Control application to address compliance challenges, reduce access-related audit findings, and achieve compliant role provisioning. Hear how, with an automated solution, Logista increases business ownership while reducing the cost and effort of access risk management.

Panel Discussions

BI Customer Panel: Featuring Shell and Celesio, and hosted by Adam Binnie (GM & Global VP Business Intelligence Solutions). How do you get the most from your business intelligence solutions? What should you look for when finding the right BI solutions? Many factors come into play regardless what industry you are from. Hear from companies explain how the SAP BusinessObjects solutions helped their users make smarter and faster decisions.

BI Product Panel: Where BI Takes Us Today: Featuring Adam Binnie (GM & Global VP Business Intelligence Solutions), Timo Elliott (Analytics Evangelist) and Thierry Donnadieu (Head of Business Analytics EMEA consulting). As businesses strive to find efficient ways to deliver attractive offerings to customers, how can yours do the same? BI solutions help businesses identify profitable products, services, processes and even customers. What BI innovations are SAP delivering that makes companies successful? Hear from SAP product leaders to learn how BI can help your business reach new heights.

Data Warehousing Customer Panel: Providing Instant Access to Big Data: Customers discuss experiences leveraging data warehousing solutions from SAP to solve challenges stemming from managing and providing real-time access to large volumes of data. Understand the role that can be played by the SAP HANA platform; the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse component, which is powered by SAP HANA; and Sybase IQ software.

Information Governance Customer Panel: We Deliver Quality and Trusted Information to Our Business: Find Out How. With corporate decisions relying on the quality of data, and the volume of data doubling every 18 months, it’s vital for companies to firm up their corporate information governance. But who does, and why do they do it? Hear from Vodafone Group plc, Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, and Alliander about how they deliver functional data management models. – Software Solution Partner: OpenText

EPM Product Panel: Helping Ensure Quick Time to Value with SAP BusinessObjects EPM Solutions. Implementing solutions that enable better control of growth and profitability remains a priority. But today implementations need to help ensure rapid time to value. Hear project managers who have led successful implementations of SAP BusinessObjects enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions discuss their approaches and experiences.

HANA Product Panel: Getting Started with an SAP HANA Platform Implementation. Join the SAP business analytics services team and our customers to get an overview of the latest and greatest in the world of the SAP HANA platform. Learn how SAP HANA has already helped numerous customers. This session will provide you with a clear understanding of the solution, road map, deployment options, and considerations.

Innovation Panel: Innovative Use of Business Analytics for Your Industry and Line of Business. Hear how SAP customers are benefitting from key innovations in business analytics – such as the SAP HANA platform, mobility, cloud services, and collaboration – for solving critical business issues. Hear them discuss their business challenges and their experience in selecting, implementing, and using business analytics to derive business value.

BI Value Panel: How We Drive Value from Business Intelligence. How do you get the most from your business intelligence (BI) solutions? What should you look for when trying to find the right BI solutions? Many factors come into play regardless of what industry you are from. Hear from three companies about how SAP BusinessObjects solutions helped their users make smarter and faster decisions.

Midmarket BI Panel: Unleashing the Power of Business Analytics for Midsize Companies. Join this panel of midsize companies to learn their real-life stories. Hear what they did to deploy SAP BusinessObjects analytic applications, and learn how they are using the solutions to gain actionable insights – including best practices – that otherwise have been invisible to them.

Full Schedule

Here’s the full schedule of sessions that touch on Business Analytics over the two days of SAPPHIRE NOW, grouped by time slot, so you can more easily see the painful choices involved. Use the agenda builders for SAP TechEd and SAPPHIRE NOW to see more about the sessions, and to create your own list of activities that you can then email or download.  I’ve put in bold the ones I hope to attend myself – see you there!

Tuesday 9th November

SAP TechEd starts a day earlier than SAPPHIRE NOW, packed with detailed, technical information about analytics, and a keynote from Vishal Sikka, SAP Executive Board Member leading technology and innovation– see the SAP TechEd agenda for more information (Vishal presents to the SAPPHIRE NOW audience on Thursday morning).

Wednesday 10th November

Wed., 09:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. General Session – SAP Executive Keynote Speaker: Jim Hagemann Snabe, Co-CEO of SAP

• Wed., 11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.,B31336 Strategies for Enterprise Business Intelligence Success: Do You Have One?, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 303
• Wed., 11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.,B31377 What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation 10.0, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 320
• Wed., 11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.,B31601 Drive Rapid Decisions with Collaborative BI Using SAP StreamWork, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 313
• Wed., 11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.,B32755 Using Business Analytics in Your Finance Department, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 300
• Wed., 11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.,B32762 Next-Generation Analytic Applications for Industry and Line of Business, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 325
• Wed., 11:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.,B31335 Where BI Takes Us Today, 30-Minute Panel Discussion, Business Analytics Theater 1
• Wed., 11:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.,B31392 How Do Your GRC Programs Measure Up?, 30-Minute Panel Discussion, Business Analytics Theater 2

Lunch

• Wed., 01:00 p.m. – 01:45 p.m.,B31337 Embedding Analytics into SAP Business Suite Applications, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 303
• Wed., 01:00 p.m. – 01:45 p.m.,B31367 Understanding the Road Map for SAP HANA with SAP NetWeaver BW, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 310
• Wed., 01:00 p.m. – 01:45 p.m.,B31376 What’s New in Treasury and Risk Management, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 320
• Wed., 01:00 p.m. – 01:45 p.m.,B31600 Deliver Your Collaboration Strategy with SAP StreamWork, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 313
• Wed., 01:00 p.m. – 01:45 p.m.,B32753 Budgeting, Planning, and Consolidation for SMEs, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 300
• Wed., 01:00 p.m. – 01:45 p.m.,B32781 Increase Competitiveness Through Better Customer Insight, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 325
• Wed., 01:00 p.m. – 01:20 p.m.,B31332 Meet Growing Information Demands with SAP BusinessObjects BI Suite, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 1
• Wed., 01:00 p.m. – 01:20 p.m.,B31390 Tecan: Automating Internal Controls with SAP BusinessObjects GRC Solutions, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 2

• Wed., 01:30 p.m. – 01:50 p.m.,B31349 Information Governance from the Ground Up: How to Make It Real, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 1
• Wed., 01:30 p.m. – 01:50 p.m.,B31598 All for One Drives Rapid Decisions and Project Delivery with SAP StreamWork, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 2

• Wed., 02:00 p.m. – 02:45 p.m.,B31338 Transition from SAP Business Explorer to SAP BusinessObjects BI Solutions, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 303
• Wed., 02:00 p.m. – 02:45 p.m.,B31353 Why Information Governance Is Important Now, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 310
• Wed., 02:00 p.m. – 02:45 p.m.,B31380 What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Strategy Management 10.0, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 320
• Wed., 02:00 p.m. – 02:45 p.m.,B31397 Managing Risk in Today’s Business Environments, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 313
• Wed., 02:00 p.m. – 02:45 p.m.,B32747 Making Business Intelligence Work for You, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 300
• Wed., 02:00 p.m. – 02:45 p.m.,B32760 Analytics in Corporate Functions: Know, Decide, and Act With Confidence, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 325
• Wed., 02:00 p.m. – 02:20 p.m.,B32750 Release 4.0 of SAP BusinessObjects Edge Solutions Give SMEs the “Edge”, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 2
• Wed., 02:00 p.m. – 02:20 p.m.,B34204 Outinnovate Your Competition with Business Analytics Solutions from SAP, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 1

• Wed., 02:30 p.m. – 02:50 p.m.,B31374 Release 10.0 of SAP BusinessObjects EPM Solutions, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 1
• Wed., 02:30 p.m. – 02:50 p.m.,B33948 How SAP HANA Makes Businesses Run in Real Time, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 2

• Wed., 03:00 p.m. – 03:45 p.m.,B31343 Explore Data Anywhere with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 303
• Wed., 03:00 p.m. – 03:45 p.m.,B31354 Managing the Quality of Your Data from Within SAP Business Suite, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 310
• Wed., 03:00 p.m. – 03:45 p.m.,B31379 What’s New in Consolidation Solutions from SAP, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 320
• Wed., 03:00 p.m. – 03:45 p.m.,B31393 Today’s User-Access Balancing Act: Risk Versus Cost of Managing Access, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 313
• Wed., 03:00 p.m. – 03:45 p.m.,B32770 Big Data: Big In-Memory Computing Opportunities, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 300
• Wed., 03:00 p.m. – 03:45 p.m.,B32782 Advanced Analytics and Performance Management in the Public Sector, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 325
• Wed., 03:00 p.m. – 03:30 p.m.,B31364 Providing Instant Access to Big Data, 30-Minute Panel Discussion, Business Analytics Theater 1
• Wed., 03:00 p.m. – 03:30 p.m.,B32765 A New Day in the Life of Your Organization: How Business Analytics Can Help, 30-Minute Panel Discussion, Business Analytics Theater 2
• Wed., 03:00 p.m. – 03:45 p.m.,M24847 How Pfizer Uses Mobile Business Analytics from SAP, 45-Minute Microforum, Mobility Microforum 201

• Wed., 04:00 p.m. – 04:45 p.m.,B31341 Manage More with the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 303
• Wed., 04:00 p.m. – 04:45 p.m.,B31357 How Does EIM Fit Within Your Enterprise Architecture?, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 310
• Wed., 04:00 p.m. – 04:45 p.m.,B31378 What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management 10.0, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 320
• Wed., 04:00 p.m. – 04:45 p.m.,B31398 Integrating Identity Management with Access Risk Management Solutions, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 313
• Wed., 04:00 p.m. – 04:45 p.m.,B32748 Why Data Strategy Is Critical for Implementation of BI and SAP HANA, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 300
• Wed., 04:00 p.m. – 04:45 p.m.,B32780 Using Business Analytics to Manage Risk for Your Industry, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 325
• Wed., 04:00 p.m. – 04:20 p.m.,B31362 Why Medtronic Chose SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver BW to Stay Competitive, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 1*

* [I’ll be presenting “The Future of Work” in the Spotlight theatre: it will be recorded and available for viewing after SAPPHIRE

• Wed., 04:30 p.m. – 04:50 p.m.,B33927 BASF: Secure Supply Chain with SAP BusinessObjects Global Trade Services, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 1
• Wed., 05:00 p.m. – 05:20 p.m.,B31331 Novartis: Our Journey to Integrated Business Intelligence, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 1
• Wed., 05:30 p.m. – 05:50 p.m.,B31333 Turn “Big Data” into Business Value with Real-Time BI, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 2
• Wed., 05:30 p.m. – 05:50 p.m.,B32745 Combining the Power of SAP HANA with Predictive Analytics, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 1

Day 2 Thursday 11th November

9:00 am to 10:30 am Keynote presentation – Vishal Sikka, SAP Executive Board Member leading technology and innovation

• Thu., 11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.,B31340 Gain Business Insight with SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 303
• Thu., 11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.,B31358 Enterprise Information Management with the Right Data Migration Strategy, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 310
• Thu., 11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.,B31382 Understanding SAP Solutions for Cost and Profitability Analysis, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 320
• Thu., 11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.,B31395 Navigating Your Risk, Compliance, and Controls Programs, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 313
• Thu., 11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.,B32759 Learn How Collaboration and Analytics Are Changing Supply Chain Management, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 325
• Thu., 11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.,B32771 Future of Analytics: Are You Ready for In-Memory Computing and Mobility?, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 300
• Thu., 11:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.,B31352 We Deliver Quality and Trusted Information to Our Business: Find Out How, 30-Minute Panel Discussion, Business Analytics Theater 2
• Thu., 11:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.,B31375 Helping Ensure Quick Time to Value with SAP BusinessObjects EPM Solutions, 30-Minute Panel Discussion, Business Analytics Theater 1

Lunch

• Thu., 01:00 p.m. – 01:45 p.m.,B31339 Information Access with the Semantic Layer of SAP BusinessObjects BI Suite, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 303
• Thu., 01:00 p.m. – 01:45 p.m.,B31366 Value Drivers: Understanding Business Benefits Derived from SAP HANA, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 310
• Thu., 01:00 p.m. – 01:45 p.m.,B31383 The Financial Closing Cockpit, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 320
• Thu., 01:00 p.m. – 01:45 p.m.,B31394 The Next Step in Your Control and Compliance Programs: Automated Controls, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 313
• Thu., 01:00 p.m. – 01:45 p.m.,B32754 SAP BusinessObjects BI Suite: Complementary Solutions to SAP Software, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 300
• Thu., 01:00 p.m. – 01:45 p.m.,B32763 Stay Competitive 24×7 with Analytics on Your Mobile, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 325
• Thu., 01:00 p.m. – 01:20 p.m.,B31371 Integrated Financial Reporting and Planning with SAP Software at Statoil, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 1
• Thu., 01:00 p.m. – 01:20 p.m.,B32751 Helping Midsize Companies Plan, Budget, and Forecast Amid Constant Change, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 2

• Thu., 01:30 p.m. – 01:50 p.m.,B31330 Transform How You Do Business by Mobilizing Decision Making, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 1
• Thu., 01:30 p.m. – 01:50 p.m.,B32776 Get the Inside Story on Deloitte’s Implementation of SAP HANA, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 2

• Thu., 02:00 p.m. – 02:45 p.m.,B31342 Maximize Analysis Potential with SAP BusinessObjects Analysis Software, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 303
• Thu., 02:00 p.m. – 02:45 p.m.,B31365 SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse 7.3: Update and Impact of SAP HANA, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 310
• Thu., 02:00 p.m. – 02:45 p.m.,B31381 Going the Last Mile of Finance with New Disclosure Management Software, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 320
• Thu., 02:00 p.m. – 02:45 p.m.,B31396 What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Global Trade Services 10.0, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 313
• Thu., 02:00 p.m. – 02:45 p.m.,B32749 Forecast Accuracy: Maximizing the Usefulness of Business Planning, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 300
• Thu., 02:00 p.m. – 02:45 p.m.,B32784 Predictive Analytics and SAP In-Memory Computing for CP and Retail, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 325
• Thu., 02:00 p.m. – 02:30 p.m.,B32746 Getting Started with an SAP HANA Platform Implementation, 30-Minute Panel Discussion, Business Analytics Theater 2
• Thu., 02:00 p.m. – 02:30 p.m.,B32779 Innovative Use of Business Analytics for Your Industry and Line of Business, 30-Minute Panel Discussion, Business Analytics Theater 1

• Thu., 03:00 p.m. – 03:45 p.m.,B31344 Empower Your Workforce with Mobile Analytics, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 303
• Thu., 03:00 p.m. – 03:45 p.m.,B31368 Leveraging Sybase IQ for Better Business Performance, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 310
• Thu., 03:00 p.m. – 03:45 p.m.,B32769 Analytics on the Go: What’s Your Mobile Strategy?, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 300
• Thu., 03:00 p.m. – 03:45 p.m.,B32783 What Does Predictive Analytics Mean for Product and Service Creation?, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 325
• Thu., 03:00 p.m. – 03:20 p.m.,B31363 Why AOK Chose SAP HANA for Real-Time Analytics, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 1
• Thu., 03:00 p.m. – 03:20 p.m.,B32778 Next-Generation Analytic Apps for Your Industry and Line of Business, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 2

• Thu., 03:30 p.m. – 03:50 p.m.,B32758 Business Analytics for Your Operations, Procurement, and Supply Chain, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 2
• Thu., 03:30 p.m. – 03:50 p.m.,B33779 Logista: Managing Access Risk with SAP BusinessObjects Access Control, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 1

• Thu., 04:00 p.m. – 04:45 p.m.,B31356 Driving Business Value with Holistic Lifecycle Management of Information, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 310
• Thu., 04:00 p.m. – 04:45 p.m.,B32761 Drive Effective Sales and Marketing Decisions with Analytics from SAP CRM, 45-Minute Microforum, Business Analytics Microforum 325
• Thu., 04:00 p.m. – 04:20 p.m.,B31350 Empower Business Users to Bring Data Quality to the Next Level, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 1
• Thu., 04:00 p.m. – 04:20 p.m.,B32757 Improve Profitability by Leveraging Better Business Analytics for CRM, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 2

• Thu., 04:30 p.m. – 04:50 p.m.,B31351 Best Practices for a Successful Enterprise Information Management Project, 20-Minute Presentation, Business Analytics Theater 2

• Thu., 05:00 p.m. – 05:30 p.m.,B31334 How We Drive Value from Business Intelligence, 30-Minute Panel Discussion, Business Analytics Theater 1
• Thu., 05:00 p.m. – 05:30 p.m.,B32752 Unleashing the Power of Business Analytics for Midsize Companies, 30-Minute Panel Discussion, Business Analytics Theater 2

Finally, here’s a quick guide to getting the most out of the event from a social point of view:

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Photo of the Feria de Madrid by marcp_dmoz on Flickr

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.

When was the last time you had a roll of film developed?

If you’re reading this, you’re no technology luddite, so it was probably already many years ago. Film – a technology that had been slowly improved and perfected over 200 years  – was replaced in less than a decade by a much faster, cheaper, and more convenient technology approach.

In an earlier post, I outlined why I think we’re on the brink of a real revolution in business analytics infrastructures. This post draws out some of the parallels with the shift from analog to digital image processing, and the effects it had on the industry as a whole.

Film Cameras Compared to Today’s Data Warehouses

Data warehousing today has a lot in common with the first photos I took fifteen years ago with my then-brand-new Canon Elan II camera:

High Costs

Buying film and getting pictures processed got very expensive very quickly. Only a tiny minority of professionals could take as many shots as they wanted – the rest of us had to be choosy about our shots.

Today’s data warehousing is complex and expensive, and organizations have to ruthlessly prioritize which projects will be undertaken. Meanwhile, other worthy projects have to wait, business users have to rely on gut feel.

Upfront Planning Required

In order to get the best results, you had to know in advance what kind of thing you were going to be taking shots of. Want to take a landscape shot? You needed 100 ISO and daylight film. An action shot in a hockey rink? 1600 ISO and tungsten lighting. A colorful tropical scene? High-saturation Fujifilm Velvia. A moody night shot of Paris? High-grain Kodak black-and-white xyz….  And the film only came in 24 or 36 pictures – you just changed your mind about what you wanted to take picture of? Tough.

Today’s data warehouses require you to decide in advance what data you’ll want to access later – and if you change your mind, you have to go back to the source data and reload it with different transformations.

Slow Feedback Loop

What you saw through the eye-piece was very different from the resulting picture. By the time you got the film back and realized that the exposure was wrong, or the framing a little off, there wasn’t that much you could do about it. The slow feedback loop meant that lots of good pictures were missed, and that you had to take more pictures than you needed. Want a great shot of a high-contrast night scene? You needed to take multiple long exposures (with the associated high costs) in order to have a hope of getting what you wanted.

By the time business people have had a chance to access the data, reports, and dashboards in your business intelligence solutions, you’ve already put in huge amounts of efforts – and the business has moved on, and now has different needs. To try to avoid this, you try to add all the data you might need into the data warehouse, but this increases the project cost and complexity.

Arcane Knowledge

With enough training, skilled photographers understand all the variables involved in getting the right picture, and were able to get more consistent, reliable results. But even they had to rely on specialized film processors to actually get the results.

Because of all the factors mentioned above, data warehousing today requires lots of arcane knowledge to be successful, and the people that know how to do it are in high demand and short supply.

Digital Cameras Compared to New Analytics Platforms Powered by In-Memory and Other Technologies*

I purchased one of the first consumer digital cameras, the Sony DSC-F1. It transformed the way I took pictures, just as in-memory computing is transforming analytics.

Cheap, Easy, Iterative Learning and Experimentation

The screen shows you exactly the shot that you’re going to take, and digital cameras don’t require film or processing, so the marginal cost of another picture is effectively zero. You can try things, and if they don’t work out, you can instantly adjust your approach and try again. Things like f-stops still make a difference to the end result, but you can learn how it works in an intuitive way, rather than having to wade through mathematics. Previously essentially accessories like light meters become unnecessary – you can get the effect you need through trial-and-error in the same time it took you to work out the light readings.  We are all better photographers now – because we can experiment, and throw away 90% of our pictures without worrying about it.

Once you have the row-level data in-memory, you can easily change your analytic view on the fly. You want to use a different attribute, rolled-up in a different way? Rather than having to reload and retransform the data, you can simply make a change to the metadata, and the users get the results they want. You can quickly and iteratively prototype your business intelligence solutions, rather than having to try to rigorously plan everything in advance. Faster, more convenient analytics results in better analytics.

Faster Innovation

The combination of photography and computing has transformed what you can do with photos. Here are just some of the things that were almost unimaginable with analog film:

• Different camera angles. You used to have to view everything through the eyepiece. Replacing it with a screen made it easy to get a new view on what you were looking at
• Taking a picture of something that happened in the past. This seems like science fiction, but several digital cameras use a buffer to store the last few seconds of whatever you’re looking at, so even if pressed the shutter too late when your daughter scored the winning goal, you can back up to
• High dynamic range. The human eye sees more shades than any current camera. The latest cameras automatically take several shots and combine them to create a full range of shades, and you can choose the exposure afterwards.
• Selective focus. Today, some celebrity photographers only take pictures fully in-focus, and rely on Photoshop to introduce focus wherever they need it. And a brand-new camera promises to use some cool multi-lens technology and digital processing to let the rest of us do this very easily.

We’re just at the very start of what we’ll be able to do with in-memory systems. For example, it seems that in-memory column stores are well-adapted to extending enterprise analytics to unstructured data, real-time data, social data, etc — things we’ve been struggling with using traditional data warehouse approaches.

Integration With Other Systems

My main “camera” is now my iPhone, and has become a “feature” in a larger system. The image quality of the iPhone camera isn’t great, but combined with its convenience, the flexibility of the apps, HD video, and the ability to instantly share the results, it’s replaced my larger Canon Digital EOS camera for most things.

In-memory analytics isn’t just about analytics – these technologies will be integrated directly into operational systems. There will be “one version of the truth”, because we’re doing everything with one set of data…

Morals of the story

• Digital photography transformed an industry by eliminating obsolete layers. In-memory analytics and related technologies* will do the same.
• The change from analog to digital photography didn’t happen overnight. The digital cameras were relatively expensive compared to film, and some kinds of pictures made more sense, and in particular it took a time for the new digital cameras to rival the effective picture resolution of larger-format films. “Old-style” data warehousing won’t vanish overnight, but it will inevitably be relegated to particular types of tasks as in-memory analytics becomes more robust and takes on larger volumes of data.
• Today, many BI projects end up in failure, just like most of your old photographs. In-memory analytics will improve the quality and success of analytics projects.
• Some people jumped on the early limitations of digital cameras and insisted that the answer was to tweak the existing methods (buy scanners, etc.) – which missed the bigger picture. Today, some people try to insist that in-memory is “just a memory cache”, and that incremental technologies like Flash Disk / SSDs are the answer. Don’t be in denial.
• If your job relies on your existing data warehousing skills, better get used to the new world, or move to another role…

For more about SAP HANA and in-memory technology, visit http://experiencesaphana.com. And if you are interested in photography, you can find my photos here: http://blog.timoelliott.com (daily updates) and http://timoelliott.com/personal

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*Updated from original post — although I say “in-memory”, it’s really about a collection of various technologies including in-memory, massively parallel hardware, column stores, and in-database analytics – please see the link at the start of the post for more details.