The ASUG board of directors announced that they intend to open a new seat dedicated to a Business Objects customer. This board position is intended to be filled by a customer that is not running any SAP enterprise products but has heavily invested in Business Objects technology. If you are a dedicated Business Objects customer and have a high-level executive that would be interested in sharing your viewpoint with the rest of the board and ensuring that your voice is heard then ASUG wants to hear from you.

I am no longer a member of the GBN steering committee. I didn’t get fired there just isn’t a need for that group anymore. However, ASUG has asked each of the steering committee members to stay on in a new role: I am now a Global Ambassador for Business Objects within ASUG. Or something like that. There were some details about the new ambassador program released at the planning meeting, but I expect that a more formal press release might be coming out at some point once the program has more details. In an interesting twist the global ambassadors (former steering committee members) have also been granted SAP Mentor status, which I already had. I certainly feel that’s a positive step because in my experience the Mentor program has remained primarily focused on the SAP enterprise products. The amount of content related to “classic” Business Objects products and services has been in the minority.

There were several activities going on in parallel during the summit. One group was focused on finalizing the selections for the spring ASUG conference which is co-located with SAPPHIRE in Orlando. Another group was working on plans for year-round content such as webinars. There were discussions about the influence councils. (I asked about the results from the Web Intelligence influence council from last year and was told it was essentially done and was being reviewed by the legal department. Hopefully we’ll see something soon.) I am assuming that a next step will be to request abstracts for the fall conference and repeat the planning process for that event.

I did a bit of work tonight on BOB to remove the GBN logo from the user profile screen. It has been replaced by an ASUG profile icon instead. I also swapped out the GBN logo from the sidebar of my blog and replaced it with the ASUG logo and a link to the organization home page. This will be my last blog post that gets the “GBN” tag as well.

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.

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 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 …

I spent several days filling out this evaluation form before I decided that I needed to read it closely. Unfortunately, here’s how I filled them out:

Now do you see the problem? And how it’s not the report writers fault? Once the data is collected, there’s no way to go back and redo it.

Still don’t see what my concern is?

The survey form is not consistent. In four of the five questions the best possible response is all the way to the right. However, for one question (the fourth one) that is not the case. The question in this case was related to how technical the content was. The best answer would be 3 or “Just right” instead of 5 for this one question. By the time I realized that, it was too late. I would love to see the overall speaker survey results, because I suspect I am not the only one making this mistake. Once I saw the pattern from the first few questions on the form, I made the (incorrect) assumption that the rest of the questions followed the same pattern. As a result of my error, the data from my survey submissions are wrong.

Because the form is (in my opinion) poorly designed, the data is likely to be wrong. If the data is wrong, the report will be wrong. Because the report is wrong, the speaker will be given the wrong indication as to the quality of their presentation. And it’s not the report writers fault.

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.

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?

Sometimes, though, I want more.

Because of this desire to have more or at least different data to use, I have gone looking for some alternatives. One that I found and started using years ago was the old Oracle demo database for Summit Sporting Goods. I like this database because even though it is very simple and small it still has a lot of good challenges to solve. Would you believe you could have a loop with one table and one join in a database? Can you have a fan trap with only two tables? The answer to both of those questions is “Yes, you can.” That means Summit Sporting Goods makes a great demo database, especially for universe design.

Ultimately, though, I wanted a really big database (bigger than eFashion) that I could use for presentations or technical tips. Instead of trying to make something up, I have captured (with permission) some data from a client. Everything about the database will be changed except for the rows and relationships. Product and customer names as well as any identifying attributes will be altered. General invoice data as far as dates, line items, and as mentioned before the relationships to other dimension tables will remain the same. Quantities and dollars will be modified up or down by a random factor for each row. The final result will be a snowflake schema because I like some of the extra features that I can talk about with that sort of structure. The raw data was in Microsoft Access to start with but the final version will end up in Oracle.

Is anyone wondering yet what the point is for this post?

I am interested in finding out if folks have an opinion as to which – if any – of these databases I should make available for download here on my blog. My original intent was to make them available in Oracle format only. The main reason for that has been given above (it’s a better database for showing various techniques). The secondary reason is that I already have everything in Oracle so I don’t have to do any additional work.

I am not committing to doing anything just yet. But if anyone has an opinion or concern one way or another about this idea, please feel free to leave a comment and share your thoughts. Thanks in advance.

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.

To be honest, the idea of starting up a new business right now was a bit scary. We have two kids (age 8 and 6) and I really want to be able to be involved in their lives as they grow up. Right now we’re active in soccer (football to you non-US folks ) and cub scouts and church activities. I want to be able to see soccer games and go camping with the scouts. Starting a new venture, potentially having to travel quite a bit, the uncertain economy… all of these things were factors to consider. I feel like I was ready to take on the challenge, but there were clearly lots of concerns to consider.

I had mentioned that I was going on vacation for a few weeks. While I was on vacation (on a tour bus in Alaska, if you can believe that) I got a phone call with a job offer. The best news is that my new employer is well aware of my activity on BOB, of my participation in various conferences, and even this blog. They are expecting me to continue all of those activites, which is why I suggested earlier that nothing will change. Which brings me to the next question… who was the job offer from?

For nearly a decade I have been consulting either part or full-time for PepsiCo. I started working for them during their 5.0 to 5.1 upgrade by helping them size and configure their cluster. At one point they had nine Windows NT servers running Web Intelligence (version 2.5 at that time) and Broadcast Agent. Ah, good times. For the past several years I have been involved in a long-term project building a data warehouse for one of their major divisions. (PepsiCo includes Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Tropicana, Quaker, and Gatorade, in case you didn’t know that.) It was a great project to be involved with, and I was disappointed when my contract expired this past June.

It turns out that PepsiCo knew they needed someone to replace my role (or something similar). They had created a new position and posted it on their recruiting web site. (I didn’t even know they had one.) Just before I left town for my vacation I went to the D/FW user group meeting and was able to have conversations with a number of different folks. I was also able to pass out some “Dagira Group” business cards. I printed them myself. One of them made its way to the appropriate person at PepsiCo, and they tracked me down while on vacation to offer me the position they had just created.

After a brief conversation I accepted the job. I already knew the people, the environment, and essentially knew the job. There will be additional opportunities and challenges as an employee that were not available to me as a consultant and I am looking forward to those. My new title is BI Solutions Architect, and I start today.

If you are reading this soon after it has been published, then it’s quite likely that I am still sitting in my new hire orientation meeting.

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.