Dave’s Adventures in Business Intelligence

I spent last Sunday and Monday in Atlanta. I didn’t see much of the city as I was holed up in a downtown hotel with 250 of my closest friends working on plans for ASUG’s coming year. There were a number of interesting things that came out of the meeting. I already posted about the location and dates for the fall conference. There are a few other tidbits that I wanted to share as well. In no particular order… Continue reading “ASUG Volunteer Summit”

Hi, folks, just wanted to let everyone know that I realize there are a number of comments or questions that have been piling up without responses. I’m a bit busy with work and preparing for the ASUG volunteer summit being held this weekend. I will catch up on comments and have some news about the GBN merger into ASUG and I hope some news about the fall Business Objects conference after this weekend.

It has been an interesting year. I got to attend more conferences this year than any other year before. I left one company and joined another. The GBN grew and then ultimately merged into ASUG. BOB grows ever closer to the next milestone (600,000 posts and 50,000 users). My BI blog (this site) has been running for eighteen months now, which some say is the average lifespan of a personal site or blog.

I’m not done yet. I’m done for this year, but I’ll see you again shortly.

Best wishes to you and yours during this holiday season.

Found this on another blog and had to share it…

You can see where I found the video and read another take on the future of “independent” Business Objects on David Taylor’s Business Intelligence Blog.

Other items on the good news front… I have been continuing to challenge the ASUG/GBN folks about the location and time for the fall Business Objects conference. The inside rumor is that the initial round of location proposals has been processed and some final decisions are being made. I suggested Maui as a location, but it seems that’s not going to be an option.

I recently attended the 2009 TechEd conference. Here is a copy of the top portion of the session evaluation form. Notice anything that might cause a problem?

I know that form was reduced to fit the size of the page so it may not be immediately obvious what I think the issue is. In order to make it more clear I have posted a larger view of the specific survey choices.

Look at it for a bit and when you’re ready … Continue reading “It’s Not Always The Report Writers Fault”

The last few weeks have been busy. Oh, I know it doesn’t look like that with the lack of new posts coming out on my blog. But trust me, things have become quite hectic. I am getting ready to head off to SAP TechEd 2009 in Phoenix next week. I get to follow that up by attending the GBN Annual Conference for 2009 right here in Dallas. I was able to almost (but didn’t quite yet) make my goal of documenting all of the slides from my GBN presentation last year as blog posts. I have one more post to finish that will complete the extended version of the Designer presentation from 2008. (Maybe I will get the post done one evening at TechEd.)

I hope to put out some daily blog posts from both conferences. My focus this year for TechEd is going to be to try to learn as much as I can about BW and BEx and how they integrate with Business Objects tools. I haven’t done much in that area yet, and I am starting to see more questions on BOB related to these concepts and I would like to know what’s going on.

Another task that has occupied time over the past few weeks was moving to a new laptop. My older laptop had done a great job over the years of supporting my demonstrations, but it was getting “tired” and not able to keep up with the larger virtual machines required to run the latest software. My new laptop should do a real nice job running VMware: I am running the 64bit version of Vista with 8GB of RAM (half of which I can dedicate to the virtual machine). It has a dual-core CPU (3GHz clock speed and 6MB of cache and 1066MHz front-side bus) as well as a 7200 RPM hard drive and… and well, you probably don’t care about the rest of the hardware specifications. Suffice it to say, it runs XI 3 in a virtual image along with Oracle and all of my other goodies quite nicely.

I have several draft posts queued up to finish, including the already mentioned completion of the Time Sliced Measures implementation, part II of the rebate post that a couple of folks have mentioned, and I have a head start on some posts related to my 2009 GBN presentation ready to come out. All of this means there should be more than just filler “news” posts in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

This morning on my way into work I heard a commercial for IBM Cognos business intelligence solutions on the radio. This was normal (meaning local) radio, not satellite or anything special like that. The target audience was apparently small business owners. I normally tune out commercials but when I realized they were talking about “business intelligence” I turned up the volume to see just what they were talking about.

They went through most of the 60-second spot without mentioning any product names. Only at the very end did they mention IBM Cognos, a web address, and a toll-free number to call in for more details.

Has anyone else heard this, or something similar?

It’s really hard to make up reasonable fake data. Or maybe it’s just hard for me, because I have tried and not been very successful. For this reason I have typically used eFashion or Island Resorts Marketing for my various technical tips and conference presentations. They’re small enough to be speedy during conference demonstrations, but complex enough to be interesting. For the conference coming next month I am also going to use the “Motors” database provided in the designer training class. I have converted these databases to Oracle because it allows me to have more fun. Microsoft Access is easy and portable but doesn’t provide all of the features that I would like.

Sometimes, though, I want more. Continue reading “Good Sample Databases Can Be Hard To Find”

Last month I wrote a post introducing the Dagira Group. I talked to a few folks about some ideas I had. I filled out the paperwork and registered a basic business in the state of Texas.

After all of that, it seems that I am going in a different direction instead. What does that mean for me? for this blog? for B B? Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine. Continue reading “News Post – September 2009″

I have been primarily a technical guy. For that reason most of my posts on my blog fall into the same category. There are plenty of other folks that talk about the big picture, many of whom do a great job. I enjoy reading some of these other blogs and one in particular that I like to read belongs to Timo Elliott. He is the source of the bouncing objects Windows cursor that we have available for download on BOB.

Earlier I was reading some of his older posts that I had missed, and found a real gem. If you have a few minutes, trot on over to Timo’s blog and read his recent post about testing your decision making skills. In my opinion it’s not only fun to read, but more importantly, provides some important lessons for BI practitioners.

Moral of the story: it doesn’t matter how accurate your information is if users can’t understand it.