What I Learned about BI at SAP World Tour UK 2010

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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

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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:

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

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I kicked off the afternoon with a “mini-keynote” presentation on the Business Intelligence Future: Simple, Seamless, Social, and Strategic

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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.

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

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

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

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The best ways to improve and encourage BI usage:

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

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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:

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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.

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Highlights in SP2 include:

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Highlights in SP3 include:

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

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image 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.

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Andy covered the range of analytic applications currently available:

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

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

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

[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157624324337449″]

Comments

2 responses to “What I Learned about BI at SAP World Tour UK 2010”

  1. […] Jonathan Neale, the Managing Director of the McLaren racing team gave more details of how the team approaches performance management at similar event a couple of years ago. […]

  2. Cristian Orellana Avatar
    Cristian Orellana

    Great post, Timo. Thanks for posting the presentations.

    Cristian