Clear Intelligence Future: Simple, Seamless, Social, and Strategic

Please find below my presentation from today’s Gartner BI Summit EMEA in London. If you were there, thanks for attending, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did! You can download a pdf version here and the full PowerPoint file, including the Xcelsius dashboards here. Update: You can see a screencam recording of this presentation here. Was this interesting? Share with others on Twitter with automatic URL shortening!   Read More →

Season’s Greetings with Xcelsius!

Here is a season’s greetings dashboard that shows off some of the latest features of Xcelsius 2008 SP3. Tweet the color you’d like to see in the garland. The dashboard updates every 30 seconds. How long Twitter search takes to recognize the tweet can be pretty variable – but most of the time, it’s less than a minute. How it works: I set up an Excel XML Connection that grabs a feed from Twitter using the search term “#twitterlights”. The... [Read More...]

What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius 2008 SP3?

Here’s a summary of some of the new things in the latest version of Xcelsius 2008. I’ve borrowed liberally from the official documentation that you can download, along with the program, here. New Components Sparkline chart components. The new Sparkline chart is based on the Sparkline chart created by Edward Tufte and provides a method for displaying a one-dimensional range of numeric data in a way that is dense, takes up a small space, and can... [Read More...]

Real Real-Time Analytics

Here’s a great video from this weeks SAP Influencer Summit featuring the advantages of real-time, in-memory analytics. You can see the full list of recorded keynote sessions here (registration required). If you’re interested in business intelligence and analytics, you’ll find it mentioned in the presentations by Jim Snabe, Vishal Sikka, Marge Breya and John Wookey. The sessions featured interaction with Twitter very heavily, using the... [Read More...]

Integrating Live Twitter Streams into PowerPoint Using Xcelsius

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

How to Create and Deploy Effective Metrics

I’m trying to catch up on a big backlog of materials and documents and documents that I’ve found useful… Here’s an excellent best practices report from TDWI on “how to create and deploy effective metrics” (registration required). The introduction to the document explains the background: Performance metrics are a powerful tool of organizational change. The adage “What gets measured, gets done,” is true. Companies that define objectives,... [Read More...]

SAP’s Sustainability Dashboards

The SAP’s Sustainability Report web site provides a great example of how business intelligence can help with sustainability reporting and analysis. All public organizations will have to start providing this time of information in the future, and SAP BusinessObjects provides some great tools to do it with. Here are some of the Xcelsius dashboards that are provided as part of the report: Environment Carbon Footprint

Over 100 Free SAP BusinessObjects Web Seminars

Looking for some free training in these difficult economic times? Here’s a long, long list (OK, so there are “only” 96 of them) of free web seminars courtesy of the SDN BusinessObjects Web Seminar Series and Jason Cao. They cover almost every aspect of the BusinessObjects Intelligence Platform. And if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can register to be notified by email of upcoming BusinessObjects webinars and suggest topics... [Read More...]

Great Examples of US Government BI Transparency

We’re clearly entering a new era in government transparency, and we can hope that allowing citizens to access information interactively through business intelligence functionality to spot inefficiencies and opportunities will be a big part of transforming the way the public sector works. In my previous post, I talked about how the American Recovery and Reinvestment act is perhaps the largest, most complex business intelligence application ever.... [Read More...]

Drink Dispenser Analytics: Coca-Cola Goes Freestyle, With Help from SAP BI

Mary Hayes Weier of InformationWeek recently published a great article, Coke’s RFID-Based Dispensers Redefine Business Intelligence. Coca-Cola has introduced a new RFID-enabled drink dispenser called Freestyle. It provides mass customization with 30 flavor cartridges (sodas, teas, flavored waters, etc.) that can be mixed to make more than 100 different drinks (out of the more than 3,000 that Coca-Cola sells around the world). Starting this... [Read More...]

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