Dave’s Adventures in Business Intelligence

I’m at my first MicroStrategy conference this week. It’s interesting to see what is different and what’s the same compared to the Business Objects conferences that I normally attend. For one thing, they don’t hand out survey forms at the sessions. For a BI / data company, that seems surprising. The food here (which I know is a big reason why folks come to conferences, yes? ) is like the food used to be at Business Objects conferences several years ago, that is to say we sit down for lunch and they bring around plates. Yesterday was chicken, pasta, green beans, and cheesecake for dessert. It was quite good.

That being said, try to find a bottle of water, or even a water cooler, anywhere around the place. It’s nearly impossible. I finally found some water late yesterday afternoon, after asking a number of different conference folks and getting blank looks or, “I think I saw some over there, somewhere…” comments. The wireless has been good, although it ironically dropped out (at least for me) in the room I went to for the mobility track. That track is all the way on the end of the hotel, so perhaps they need another access point.

Not only are they not handing out survey forms during the sessions, but they’re not scanning our badges as we enter the rooms. Again, for a data company I find that surprising.

But what about the content? Yesterday I attended three sessions. The first was a joint session between Teradata and eBay. The Teradata folks talked about their generic concepts for “big data” and how to let analysts make the best use of it. The eBay gentleman then talked about some specifics around how they work with their large data sources (petabytes of data). It was interesting but I didn’t see a lot of MicroStrategy stuff, just big data stuff. Next I went to a session delivered by LinkedIn. I found it to be more interesting because in this case they talked about data quality issues that I can certainly related to. BOB is nowhere near as big as LinkedIn (they have 135MM users at this point) but we still have consistency issues. For example, the presenter asked the audience how many ways we thought the job title of “Software Engineer” appeared in their database. The majority of the guesses were very low compared to the actual value of over 6,000. They have over 8,000 different iterations of the company name IBM! As you can imagine, searching is a big challenge for LinkedIn. As I said, the talk was interesting, but at the end the presenter had not talked about MicroStrategy or shown a single product during the entire talk! In fact that was the first question from the audience, “How are you using MicroStrategy in your environment?”

The last session I attended (the aforementioned mobility track) was given by a presenter from Lowes Hardware. Lowes is a big user of MicroStrategy products. (In fact their former CIO is now apparently in charge of the cloud for MicroStrategy.) He was by far the most engaging presenter and he powered through his session even after the failure of the audio equipment in the room. Lowes has purchased over 40,000 iPhones and has apparently bet big on that hardware platform along with the mobile products from MicroStrategy. He gave a great example… every store manager used to spend a few minutes each morning jotting down some notes from a sales report in order to have that information with him or her at any point throughout the day. Just a few minutes a day, but it was something they did essentially every day. The replaced the report delivery (and hand notations) with a mobile app and eliminated those few minutes. It doesn’t sound like much, does it? They estimated that the savings (I assume based on average pay for store managers) at only $6.84. I think I have that number correct, if I’m wrong it’s not by much. When that savings was multiplied by the number of managers across all stores, and then multiplied again by the number of days in a year, the total productivity savings came out to $4.3 million dollars. Per year. Talk about a quick return on investment, yes?

The app was cool, but I wanted to know more about how it was built, what tools were used, and what the process looked like. So far the sessions I’ve attended have been very light on specifics, so I hope I pick better sessions today. Will let you know tomorrow.

There were certainly a number of interesting developments in 2011, including the release of BI 4.0 and the ever increasing hype about HANA. But more importantly my family ended the year healthy and happy and that’s far more important. I certainly wish the same for you, your family, and your friends. I’m taking a break now and will be back again to talk about mundane BI topics next year.

I will be kicking off January with the next post in my “becoming a blogger” series. I will be starting off my conference season for 2012 by attending MicroStrategy World later that month followed by attendance (and speaking) at the BI 2012 event at the end of February. I’m delivering several track sessions at BI 2012, including co-teaching a primer on universe design with Michael Welter.

But until then, best of wishes to everyone for a happy and healthy new year.

One of the possible enhancements we have been requesting for years is the ability to validate prompts. (We’ve also been looking for the ever-so-popular ability to use a formula such as “Today()” as a default for a prompt but this is different.) If we had true cascading prompts in Web Intelligence that would eliminate one use case for validated prompts but not all. I had someone comment on my blog recently asking about how to validate one prompt selection against another and that started me thinking… what would something like this look like if we did get it? Continue reading “Why Can’t I Validate Prompts?”

Most of my friends know that I’m their friend in real life, not on Facebook. I’ve never joined that service, initially through lack of interest and later on through genuine concerns over their privacy issues and how much data people are seemingly willing to give up for a web site with, frankly, fairly minimal appeal, at least to me. I have also wondered in the past why corporations are so quick to give up control over their own content (replacing www.product_name.com with www.facebook.com/product_name). MicroStrategy offers a social media plugin that can pull in Facebook data, and of course SAP offers various methods to acquire and process unstructured data via their text analytics options in their Data Services products.

But this morning I read an article from Time.com suggesting that we might be looking at the beginning of the end for Facebook. I am not going to summarize the article here, but I would like to run an informal poll.

If you are a member of Facebook, are you using it:

• More now than you did last year?
• Less now than you did last year?
• About the same as what you did last year?

Please use the comment form below to enter your response.

I was checking the weather this morning and noticed that weather.com now offers a social media component to their web site. It seems that if I am so inclined, I can see what other folks in my area are saying about the weather. Without doing much, well, any research I am guessing that they’re simply looking at the location information that can optionally be provided on tweets and then scanning for certain weather-related keywords.

Here’s a screen shot of the fail I noticed. Have a look at some of the tweets.

How many of them are about the weather versus something else?

First I see a person from Garland (not far away from me) who is tweeting what appears to be various national headlines, including one about the real estate situation in Florida. Apparently there are “clouds on the horizon.” Does that have anything to do with weather in my area? No, but it does have a key word “clouds” included.

I like the next example even more. We certainly have clouds here in Texas, but I can’t remember the last time we had a blizzard. Yet someone from Lewisville, Texas, just a few miles up the road from me, is tweeting his disappointment about being left out of (again I’m assuming) a beta program for the game company Blizzard Entertainment and their next incarnation of the Diablo game series. Yes, there is a weather-related keyword in that tweet, but would it not make sense to tie key words to geographical areas? The odds of having a blizzard in Texas (the weather kind, at least) are slim.

This is part of what makes text analytics so difficult. Business Objects purchased a company several years ago (Inxight) that delivers text analytics; this product is now a part of the Data Services product line. It would be interesting to see if they have a feature that would allow me to tie geo-location services to keywords so that I could discount tweets mentioning blizzards in Texas, or hurricanes in Alaska.

Ultimately it comes down to context. When I read those tweets, I can immediately see that they’re not really talking about the weather, even if they do have weather-related keywords. Apparently it’s still challenging for software to do the same thing. Then again, it’s hard enough to predict the weather correctly, so maybe I can forgive them a few errant tweets.

Over on BOB we’re having some fun with a few holiday logos in place of our standard green guy. Our regular board logo looks like this:

For the next few weeks, board members will see the logo rotate between alternate versions such as these:

And of course this:

During the American Thanksgiving week we used this:

Now I do realize that some of these logos are not necessarily going to reflect the global nature of our community. For example, the snowflake probably doesn’t make much sense to our friends below the equator. So that’s where this post comes in to play.

If you have a minimal amount of graphical talent (or even a lot!) and would like to have your work immortalized as a part of our community, here is your chance! Come up with a seasonal logo – it does not have to be for the end of year holiday season, it can be anything you like. For example, how about a special logo for talk like a pirate day?

Come up with a logo, and as long as it meets certain standards of taste (I don’t think I need to list the obvious issues here) we’ll consider adding your seasonal logo to the rotation next year. Until Google opens their next competition to design a Google Doodle, this could be your shot at Internet fame. Go for it.

How do you submit an idea? Check out this topic on BOB for more details.

Related Links

• What is a Google Doodle?

A few months ago I had the pleasure to talk to Courtney Bjorlin of ASUGNews.com about a Twitter exchange taking place between several folks. They were discussing the need for (and likelihood of) finding Business Objects experts (whether employees or consultants) that already have SAP skills. The main points of the discussion revolved around the concept of whether there was a current market for SAP + Business Objects skills, and secondarily whether there was even a supply of folks with the required expertise if so. I’m not in the consulting arena anymore, but I’ve seen how things have progressed over the past decade and definitely had some thoughts that I shared with Courtney. She wrote a post for ASUG News (included in the related links at the end of this post) and we also revisited the talk at the conference last month in Orlando (YouTube link also below).

I thought I would go into more depth here since I’m not bound by editorial constraints as far as post length.

My personal experience is certainly weighted on the legacy Business Objects side. I’ve been working with the products since 1995 and have seen quite a progression during the last sixteen years. Keep that in mind as you read this post as I am sure it gives me a certain bias. The question of the day: Is there is an adequate supply of Business Objects experts with SAP expertise? Does that question even make sense? Continue reading “SAP + Business Objects Skills – Do They Exist?”

In Part I of this post I talked a little bit about what I think it takes to get started in the world of blogging. In this post I would like to talk more about some of the challenges related to running your own blog. To that end I would like to answer a few questions that people have asked me, and perhaps one or two that people have not asked but maybe should have. Continue reading “Blogging For Dollars? Or Something Else?”

There have been a couple of issues discovered with my universe compare tool. One has been fixed in the code, and the other appears to be a universe issue which I have not been able to decide how to approach. An update to version 2.0.1 has been posted, so please download this updated version if you have been experiencing issues.

Context Issue

The first issue was rather generic. The message was Automation error: The server threw an exception. It seemed to happen while the code was looping through a collection of joins or contexts for some universes, although it had never happened to me during my usage. (Of course, isn’t that always the case?) One user was able to send me a copy of their universe for my testing and I was able to recreate the error which is always the first step towards a resolution. Continue reading “Dagira Change Log Utility 2.0.1 Released”

Steve, Michael, Amy, Susan and I got together with Eric Vallo and several other folks at the conference last week to talk about the origin of BOB. Amy and Susan were the co-moderators of the mailing list that became what we know as BOB today. Steve and Michael are current BOB moderators and were part of the initial discussions when we discussed options for transitioning into something beyond the list. The five of us had a great time reminiscing about how BOB came about.

Have a listen!