Here’s a really simple example: I want to ensure that a user enters an end date that is at or beyond the entered start date value. This validation rule is designed to avoid confusion since many databases will not return any rows for a “backwards” between operation. (It’s also a fairly common request, found as far back as 2006 in this topic on BOB and again 2008.) I can think of two ways to make this work. First, enforce the prompt entry order so that the user cannot enter the second date before they enter the first date, and give me some way to reference their first entered date in the list of values (LOV) for the second date. By making the second prompt constrained I would force the user to pick from the list of dates, and by referencing the first date in the LOV I can ensure that the only dates that show up do actually occur after the first date. This is technically probably easier to implement, but not the preferred solution.

A second option would be to allow me to create validation rules that fire after all of the prompts have been entered. This is far more flexible as it allows the user to respond to prompts in any order they would like (as it works today) but the validation is done before the query is sent to the database. This could be far harder to implement, primarily because I envision some form of validation language (VB? Crystal?) would be required. Do they invent some new language, or try to implement something that already exists? What if the language is not supported on all platforms? The date example that I have used so far seems fairly trivial: the rule would simply be end_date >= start_date which doesn’t look that complicated. It looks like an expression rather than a language, but a language is more than that. A full-blown language can have a grammar, reserved words, and all sorts of rules that specify how the various components can be compared.

Does my prompt validation language allow looping structures? I might want to be able to loop through a list of selected items in the case where a prompt offers more than one value. “Make sure all of the end dates are greater than or equal to the latest selected start date” would be one example. First I have to parse the list of start date values to find the largest entry, and then I have to process the list of end dates to make sure that 100% of them exceed the largest start date.

Doesn’t look so simple any more, does it?

Any prompt validation logic would also have to ensure that validation loops don’t exist. Here I have defined validation rules on each entry that can be true individually but can never be true collectively. This is actually a data entry or coding error but I need to be able to check and react to that.

• Rule 1 on the start date: Make sure that the start date is greater than the end date.
• Rule 2 on the end date: Make sure that the end date is greater than the start date.

Can the start date be greater than the end date at the same time the end date is greater than the start date? Probably not. Since only one of those two rules could ever be true at a given time the query would never run. With three (or even more) prompts the potential complexity for validation loops only gets worse.

How Might Simple Validation Logic Work?

As a universe designer I am charged with creating components of code that ultimately will be placed together in some random fashion by a query writer. I have no idea what sort of questions they’re going to want to answer, nor should I be constrained by that concern. I should be able to make prompt objects that function perfectly fine by themselves, but also in combination with other prompts. The “start date / end date” example I started with is very simple. Consider this syntax:

some_table.some_date between @prompt('Enter Start Date','D',,mono,validate:&1<&2) and @prompt('Enter End Date','D',,mono,validate:&1<&2)

What I have done here is supplement the "free/constrained/primary_key" option with a new feature: validate. The syntax breaks down like this:

The < character is providing a simple validation expression "less than" using a standard mathematical symbol. Other options might include >, >=, <=, ==, and !=. These are all single-value operators that would not support a multi-selection prompt, and the scope of the &1 and &2 doesn't extend beyond this particular prompt object, but it's a start.

Named Prompt Components

In order to extend my validation scope beyond a single prompt I need to ensure that I have a unique name that I can reference. (As an aside, this is why class names must be unique within a universe structure. The class name\object name combination must be unique within the universe in order to support the @Select() functionality.) To do this, I might extend my new prompt syntax with the following:

I have introduced two new arguments. The extra argument &0 will allow me to define a unique name for this prompt, and &n:name allows me to reference that value in another prompt. Now I can create two separate prompts that look like this:

Start date check
some_table.some_date >= @prompt('Enter Start Date','D',,mono,validate:&0:start_date&n:start_date<=&n:end_date)

End date check
some_table.some_date <= @prompt('Enter End Date','D',,mono,validate:&0:end_date&n:start_date<=&n:end_date)

Keeping in mind that it is entirely likely that I would have more than one start date or end date in my universe, I would have to use more verbose prompt names like account_start_date or invoice_range_start_date and so on. In the above example I have two prompts, each has a name, and each has a validation rule. By allowing prompts to have names I can reference the result of one prompt inside of another prompt.

Event Triggers

The next challenge could be to determine when the validation logic fires. Does it fire at the end of each prompt selection? I can't really see that working because all of the required values might not yet be defined (selected). Does the validation logic fire when the query is executed? That also might not make sense because if I have a chain of three prompts where 3 depends on 2 and 2 depends on 1 I should be able to trigger the validation as soon as any two values are present. In my simple "start date / end date" example it would be easy to say that the validation logic fires as soon as both values are present. I also haven't addressed how to create the message that is delivered to the user if the prompt validation fails...

Most of the complexity in this process comes from the fact that I'm trying to design a fully generic solution. I don't want to have to write new code for each new prompt screen that I might design, I want to create reusable logic and syntax that works across the entire universe. I think it's easy to see why this is such a complex question, and perhaps indicates why we don't have anything like it so far within the universe.

But being able to set up a date value like "today" as a dynamic default value... that should be easier to implement. I hope we see that... and soon.

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 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?

Over the years I have seen far more Business Objects installations that are departmental or functional rather than enterprise wide. I see the same thing today with Microsoft products taking over a lot of the smaller to mid-sized BI projects that may have picked Business Objects in previous years. SAP, on the other hand, is by default at the enterprise level. I don’t think I ever saw a company that intended to run ERP systems from both SAP and Oracle at the same time, but I saw plenty of clients that were running Business Objects, Cognos, Microstrategy, or any of the above in various combinations. Business Intelligence just wasn’t seen as an enterprise asset, at least in the early days. Where does that leave us today? I think it might help to review where we came from and then see how that has impacted the current job / skills market.

Historical Perspective: Business Objects Careers

I started working with Business Objects in 1995 and since then I’ve seen a lot of interesting twists and turns along the way. In the old days there wasn’t much to a Business Objects installation, thus the concept of “departmental BI” that I mentioned above. We had universe developers, report developers, and users. The only “enterprise” bits were the repository (which often went to the DBA team) and the scheduler (which went to the Windows network administrators because it required a windows server to function). That was it. In fact the very first version of Business Objects that I worked with combined the “supervisor” functionality right into the reporting system. If you logged in to BusinessObjects with a specific username and password then you could set up users and change their passwords and so on.

Even the fact that the company name (Business Objects with a space) and the product name (BusinessObjects no space) were essentially the same should show how simple (and small!) things were back then. When we walked to school. In the snow. Uphill both ways, and all of that.

Because the required skill set was much smaller it was not unusual to find a true “soup to nuts” Business Objects expert in those days. When I started with Integra Solutions we only had four people in the entire company. Due to our diverse but overlapping backgrounds in databases, networking, and desktop applications we became one of the top Business Objects partners before Business Objects had a partner program (or even realized that they needed one).

Fast forward about a decade and by then Business Objects had introduced a true enterprise platform that ran on Windows, Unix, or a heterogeneous cluster (a combination of both). The administrative side of the equation was quite a bit more complex and required a broader skill set than before. We had both desktop and a web clients that could be used to build reports. Of course at first they were dramatically different and experience in one did not directly translate to the other. To further complicate matters Business Objects purchased Crystal which then meant there was a third reporting option that many folks didn’t understand. Eventually we saw a completely new server architecture (with the XI release) that was based on Crystal code. At this point finding a “soup to nuts” expert was just about impossible simply because the skills required to manage a complete Business Objects installation were so much broader in scope. So even before the SAP acquisition the consulting marketplace was becoming more and more fragmented.

Often the infrastructure team would install and configure the software, but these folks would not be able to write a report of any kind. A report developer might know Crystal, Desktop Intelligence (the new name of the original BusinessObjects desktop product), Web Intelligence, or some combination of all three. However, it was fairly rare to find someone with deep experience across the whole suite simply because for years Crystal and Business Objects had been competitors. (Somewhere along the way we also acquired Xcelsius which was yet another new and different platform.) Many report writers didn’t have a clue about developing a universe, or were in fact isolated from that part of the team. Universe development remained relatively stable from 1996 (the introduction of the “original” 4.0 release) until this time simply because the universe designer tool didn’t change that much. Ironically we have just recently seen the formal release of a dramatically different universe builder with the “new” 4.0 release. Universe designers finally have some new toys to play with.

Today we are several years into the SAP acquisition. There are SAP people that are trying to learn Business Objects, and Business Objects people trying to learn SAP. Who is the best suited for a particular application? It’s a question that I don’t think has a simple answer. Much like Crystal versus Web Intelligence, SAP was initially a competitor – or if not a competitor at least they were not always considered complementary – for Business Objects. SAP partners had no compelling reason to develop expertise in the technology simply because it was not commonly requested. SAP had BEx and BW and was deeply invested in those technologies. In all the years I spent as a Business Objects consultant I don’t think I ever once was asked to report on SAP data.

After SAP purchased Business Objects, some SAP partners went out and purchased Business Objects partners in order to get a jump start on the technology. Did that help?

The point of all of this background is that it does not surprise me at all to hear that folks are saying that there is a shortage of SAP + Business Objects skills. I expect it will continue for some time. Why?

Earlier I talked about the fact that SAP is by default an enterprise application while Business Objects does not have to be.

I feel that it’s far more likely that an SAP shop would now be interested in Business Objects experience than the other way around. Any Business Objects shop that is not already an SAP ERP customer is probably not likely to dump their current solution for SAP; it’s a far more costly decision than the other way around. So let me instead provide some thoughts about SAP shops. I would expect one of two situations: Either it’s an SAP shop that already had Business Objects experts in house because of other reporting systems / solutions or data sources outside of SAP, or it’s an SAP shop that had zero Business Objects presence prior to the merger.

Departmental Versus Enterprise

Earlier I brought up the concept of departmental BI. I think this is the first obstacle to finding or building people with deep SAP and Business Objects skills. I’ve heard more than one person talk about Business Objects as “departmental BI” because it could be implemented fairly easily. Department X would implement Business Objects while Department Y would implement Cognos, all based on their own preferences. Business Objects did not require an enterprise installation in order to be successful. That means there could easily be different expertise scattered throughout a company. I saw this many, many times during my years as a Business Objects consultant.

On the other hand, SAP — almost by definition — has to be enterprise. You won’t find Finance implementing Oracle Financials and manufacturing implementing SAP. It just doesn’t happen.

Given that, let me go back to the first scenario I mentioned earlier: an SAP installation with Business Objects as departmental BI. Suppose that the two groups are under different management. Suppose that the Finance group has long used Business Objects for reporting outside of SAP, and they already have extracts and databases and universes and everything else in place to support that. They roll up to the CFO, who may or may not have a good working relationship with the CIO who is over the SAP group. Where is the incentive for a Business Objects expert from the finance group to train an SAP expert? Or vice versa? In each case, I have to imagine that each feels the other is trying to take over their job. The Business Objects person would want to say, “Just get me to the data, I’ll take care of the rest.” The SAP person would say, “I have the data where I want it, I just need to know how to write the reports and build my dashboards.” In each case there could be a definite sense of encroachment from the other side, and a certain resistance to making that collaboration work. This scenario could play out with internal employees or external consultants. Each is trying to protect their own territory and maintain their business purpose. Once either of them becomes an expert in “the other side” then one side becomes superfluous, and nobody wants that in today’s market. In this case it’s a political rather than technical obstacle.

Take another case. Remember that SAP is typically thought of as “big” (their Business One solution not withstanding) and “big” typically means lots of people. From a human resources perspective it’s going to be considered more appropriate to try to cross train an existing surplus of folks (SAP) than hire specific experts (Business Objects) and bring on more resources. Everything today is about cutting costs, right? So take your existing SAP BW folks and make them multipurpose to avoid costs of new people. This can be done through cross-pollination with an existing group within the company (subject to the political concerns listed above), training, or temporarily hiring a Business Objects consultant. If you’re going to hire that consultant, though, wouldn’t you want them to have at least a passing knowledge of SAP so they don’t go “huh?” when you mention cubes? Thus, the perception that the BW folks are going to want their Business Objects experts to have at least some SAP knowledge is an easy leap to make. There’s a financial obstacle to getting the right people on board.

And of course I haven’t even touched on the technical issues. With XI 3.1 there are certainly some enhancements as far as how to integrate the two packages, but in my opinion they’re still really on “separate-but-not-quite-equal” footing. It’s not until BI 4.0 that we really see good integration, which means until BI 4.0 has been out in the market for some period of time, there simply isn’t a good platform to develop integrated skills. That gives us a technical obstacle to overcome in addition to any political / financial issues I’ve already mentioned.

An SAP shop with no existing internal Business Objects experts would potentially have a benefit here, as they can at least try to hire a consulting partner to come up to speed. But where did those partners get their experience?

Does Any Of This Really Matter?

Given all of these obstacles, why are SAP shops going to prefer someone with SAP skills on the Business Objects side? If you’re going to report from BW cubes and use Web Intelligence, then the report writer doesn’t need to know how the cube is built any more than they had to know how the universe was built. But if you want your report writer to also be able to talk intelligently to the cube folks and make appropriate requests for enhancements that would improve the report, then yes, they should have some background. There might be “best practices” as to how to build your cubes in order to leverage (or at least avoid pitfalls in) features of Web Intelligence, Crystal, Xcelsius, or any other new tool that they have available now. There’s also the “huh” factor I mentioned above, where if you hire an expert / consultant you really do not want to have to train them on how to access your data.

A Brief Aside

Here’s a tidbit from me personal experience: Last year I spoke at TechEd. My topic was intended to show “Business Objects for the rest of us.” My opening remarks went something along these lines:

If you are big enough to run SAP, then I can almost guarantee that you have non-SAP data that you want to report on. Yes, Business Objects has done quite a bit since the acquisition to make it easier to implement their tools on top of SAP, but what about those other data sources?

From there I went on to say that I was not going to talk about cubes, but instead would show how Business Objects works outside of an SAP environment. The goal was to give attendees some information they could take home and start thinking about how to use their new toys against those “other” databases.

The first question I got at the end of my session was about implementing BOBJ on top of cubes.

Pass The Salt

I’m currently reading a book about the history of salt in human civilization. It’s very interesting. Salt was used as a currency in many areas (and for a very long time) because of the perceived value but also the difficulty in obtaining it. A combination of deep SAP + expert Business Objects skills is probably considered extremely valuable right now for the same reason: it is rare and difficult to obtain. Mmm, salt. Time for a margarita.

(Disclosure: This post typed while listening to Jimmy Buffett.)

Related Links

• ASUGNews.com blog post: Wanted: SAP BusinessObjects Skills — Can Supply Meet Demand?
• YouTube recording of our conversation during the Orlando SAP Business Objects user conference

I don’t usually spend a lot of time here on my blog talking about philosophical aspects of BI as I am personally more interested in technical issues and solving problems. But the apparent consensus as to the importance of social media bugs me.

Let’s Start With Twitter

For example, I’m not a big fan of Twitter. I only follow a few folks, and I don’t tweet much. Yet despite my lack of interest Twitter was in the news the other day for setting a record number of tweets during the final for the women’s world cup soccer tournament. The record (which is sure to be broken) was over 7,000 tweets per second during the tournament. That exceeded the rate during the last Super Bowl (United States professional football championship in case anyone doesn’t know…), the recent royal wedding, even the announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden.

The exciting climax drew 7,196 tweets per second, according to Twitter. Paraguay’s penalty shootout win over Brazil in a Copa America quarterfinal later the same day came close to beating it with 7,166.

The previous record of 6,939 was set just after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day. Other spikes include bin Laden’s death (5,106 per second) and the Super Bowl in February (4,064).

Read the full article at ESPN.com for more details.

Seven thousand tweets per second. As a data point showing the growth of Twitter that’s certainly impressive. But how many of those tweets contained information that was valuable and relevant to what I really wanted or needed to know? How am I supposed to filter or otherwise process all of that information? Or put another way, how much of that data was signal, and how much was noise? During events like Tech Ed I already don’t tweet much because I would very likely be repeating something everyone else is already saying. Try this: search for the SAPTechEd hashtag, and see how many tweets that you find that are essentially the same. I think most folks would agree that quantity is not the same as quality, yet as a society we seem obsessed with bigger / better / faster so numbers impress us. Seven. Thousand. Tweets. Per. Second. Wow.

Some may argue that it’s not the individual tweets that become valuable at that point, it’s the overall sentiment displayed in the tweets that becomes interesting. That’s a valid point, and that’s something that the Text Analytics product (now integrated into the Data Services suite) was designed to do. High-level analysis of high-volumes of data makes sense, but I certainly can’t use it on a personal level.

Along those same lines (and related to the “my followers list is bigger than yours” competition) did you know that you can reportedly buy Twitter followers now? (Seriously, google for “buy twitter followers” and see what you find.) Why? Because people with “presence” (and to some companies presence can be defined by the size of your followers) can get paid for tweets. The Kardashian sisters are apparently masters of this, rumored to get paid in the neighborhood of $10,000 (some sites suggest even more) for a single tweet. I wonder how many followers I would have to buy before getting to that territory? What would the return on that investment look like? I remember getting excited – briefly – when I hit 100 followers. Then I went out and looked, and about 20% of them were spammers, including a number of “sweet young things” that wanted me to visit their web sites. Why would someone like that follow me? Especially when Jamie Oswald is obviously much more attractive? (He must be, he has three times as many followers as I do, not to mention 60 times as many tweets. Wait, what was that quality versus quantity thing again? )

In Which I Personally Declare 99% Of The Internet To Be Crap

The Internet is a wild place where what few rules might exist are not always followed. If there is money to be made, then someone will figure out a way to abuse the system. It’s not just the “little guys” either, as evidenced by the way retailer JC Penney took specific steps to outwit Google during the 2010 holiday shopping season. Google unwittingly initiated this years ago when they decided that their search engine would give bonus points to web sites that had more incoming links (also known as “back links” because they link back to a site) than other sites. Entire industries came into existence (SEO or Search Engine Optimization for one, link farming for another) that didn’t exist before, simply because there was money to be made. So why do spammers “follow” people on twitter? Because it’s yet another way to establish a link back to their own web site. Even if Google discounts the link, some of my other followers might be curious enough to click a link, and often that’s enough for the person on the other end to make a few pennies. Make a few pennies often enough and it can add up to real money after a while.

On BOB we are fighting this same battle and have been for years. In the early days of our community we were getting dozens and then hundreds of new members every week that signed up but never activated their accounts. Or perhaps they activated their account but never logged in to post anything. Why? It’s for the same reason, they wanted back-links to their spam web sites. Why would anybody waste time to do this? The reality is that they don’t. No single person would sit down one morning and decide to go out and register on hundreds of different discussion boards, or post comments on hundreds of different blogs. What happens instead is that a single person will instead sit down and decide to write a script that scans the Internet looking for discussion boards or blogs. Once they find them, then perhaps another script is used to go out and register and/or post on that board or blog. Last month (September, 2011) the BOB software blocked or rejected almost 20,000 such attempts. That’s over 650 attempts per day that were rejected. Numbers were even higher in previous months such as June when we blocked 23,514 similar attempts. In May it was 23,729 attempts.

Blogs are not immune. This blog ignored or denied an average of over 6,000 comment attempts per month over the last six months that were suspected to be from spammers. It’s my script fighting against their script, and it’s the “wild, wild west” all over again. As I said earlier this is not a new problem. Back in 2008 I wrote a blog post showing that spammers could have potentially cost me in the neighborhood of $20,000 had I not come up with my own automated tools to combat them.

Even Big Guns Like Google Are Not Immune

Google’s gmail service is overrun. In the past year, Google’s gmail has been used more often by spammers (based on my own spammer logs) than the next five service providers combined! That includes some service providers that folks probably know (yahoo.com, aol.com), some that board and blog owners around the Internet have come to know and despise (mail.ru, gawab.com), and some that are just plain humorous (hamstermail.net and anotherspamdomain.org). No, I did not make that last one up. Gmail is not a recent problem either. Here are some numbers that I compiled back in 2009 for another site. Want to read more about web-bots and how they post while you’re sleeping at night? Here are links to “Are You A Zombie?” Part I and Part II, written – appropriately enough – on Halloween of 2008. This is not a new problem, and it continues to get worse.

It turns out that computers may be even better at solving visual CAPTCHA puzzles than humans are! A CAPTCHA or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” is that annoying series of distorted letters and/or numbers that I sometimes have to decipher in order to complete a web form.

Trust No One

Given all of this background, almost nothing blows my mind more than seeing a web address at the end of a TV commercial that links not to the advertising company’s home page but to Facebook! Why? Why are companies (and big companies too, not small ones) spending millions of dollars to build someone else’s brand? (Facebook in this case.) Beyond that, why would I trust any external entity to collect and manage what could very well be critical data from my (current or potential) consumers? And how do I know that the data you’re collecting is even valid?

There are rumors that Sarah Palin got caught setting up a secondary Facebook account, just so she could “like” herself and skew the results shown on her main page.

Why Worry About All Of This?

Aside from the stuff I have already mentioned about having to deal with spam blog comments, spam twitter followers, or spamming BOB members, is there anything else to be concerned about? Wasted time is wasted time, sure, but IT folks have become quite adept at identifying and eliminating email spam, and I’m sure we’ll get better tools to manage blogs and other social web sites as well. But I don’t think the problem stops there.

What if I am the target of an organized but subtle campaign?

Suppose I have a company… one that might be familiar: the ACME Widget Company. We make the best widgets the universe has ever seen. However, I have a major competitor who is trying to impact and they’re not shy about which methods to use. They found out that I was running a public opinion poll as to what popular color I should include in my next widget catalog. They hired some less-than-ethical programmers with plausible deniability and charged them with skewing the results of my public polling. With a little strategy, these hackers are able to carefully do so. Votes came from all over the world (via the already established botnets) and at all hours of the day. They carefully spread out the votes so that statistical analysis will not reveal any odd patterns. As a result, my new widget color for 2011 is hot pink. I produced tens of thousands of hot pink widgets, only to find out that nobody really wanted them. Is this a far-fetched scenario? Perhaps, but maybe not.

Granted an online survey should not be the only way I use to determine a new product color… but what if it was? Could we have ended up with pink M&M’s instead of purple? Would Steve’s tie still have survived if Dave been able to whip up a Twitter-spamming script to skew the votes?

What’s My Point?

Is there a point to all of this ranting about spammers and botnets and hactivists? In my opinion, despite SAP and others appearing to really want to make social media relevant, I find myself deciding that I’m not ready to trust it, not just yet. Hot topic for the day, certainly. Cute marketing gimmick with the ties? Sure. Critical success factor for my business? Not so much. With the anonymity of the Internet anyone can post anything anywhere they want, and with the help of some friendly spammers, as much as they want. It almost seems to me that people have forgotten how bad the email spam problem was years ago because IT folks and ISP’s have become fairly adept at identifying it and filtering it out. Social media services like Twitter and Foursquare and others are all going to have to figure out the same thing or they will be overrun just like Google’s gmail service already is.

As an aside: I talked to Timo Elliott at a conference a few years back and I asked him how he dealt with what surely must be hundreds if not thousands of “link requests” on LinkedIn from folks that he didn’t know. He shrugged and said that he just ignored them. This despite the fact that LinkedIn is a relatively closed system, unlike Twitter which is wide open for everyone to see and (ab)use.

If I seem bitter or disillusioned it’s probably because I know what goes on behind the scenes on my blogs and on the boards that I manage. As a result I have become more skeptical and much less trusting of data sourced from the Internet. Don’t even get me started on privacy issues related to social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, even the new Google+) as that’s an entirely different rant.

That’s my opinion today. What about five years from now?

Five years in Internet time is a lifetime. I can’t guarantee what it will be like then, but I can guarantee it will be different that probably anybody expects. Will Facebook still be here, or will it pull a MySpace and disappear? Will Twitter implode under the weight of millions of tweets, or more importantly will it finally find a way to make money? More importantly, will anybody care if they do?

Golf was another example she used. Golf really is quite an unusual way to spend time. Suppose that golf didn’t exist today, and someone came up with the idea of putting a little ball into a small hole. Weird idea, right? The most obvious solution is to pick up the ball, walk over, and drop it in the hole. Of course that’s not how golf works. They make it far harder by starting from a long way away, and using various different sticks to hit the ball towards the hole. Pretty ridiculous, right? I can only imagine what the first conversation was like as folks were inventing golf… it probably did not go as Robin Williams imagines. (Warning: includes strong language, definitely not safe for work without headphones.)

Here’s a quote from one of her slides:

Games are unnecessary obstacles we volunteer to tackle

Golf certainly fits that description. With apologies to golf fans everywhere, it’s certainly not a necessary obstacle. The same could be said for many sports. Yet today golf is a multi-billion dollar industry. Folks spend hundreds or thousands of dollars buying equipment, spend hours out of their day, just trying to get better at putting a little ball into a little hole. What are they getting out of it?

Games can be frustrating, certainly golf fits that description. But when we’re successful at overcoming the obstacles (unnecessary or not) it turns out that we can experience certain positive emotions. Those emotions (with golf annotations by me) are:

• 10. Joy – I’m happy I got the ball in the hole
• 9. Relief – I’m so relieved I got the ball in the hole
• 8. Love – I love this game because it lets me put a ball in a hole
• 7. Surprise – Did I really just get the ball in the hole?
• 6. Pride – Yes! I got the ball into the hole!
• 5. Curiosity – I wonder if it’s possible for me to get this little ball in that hole?
• 4. Excitement – Woo hoo! The ball went into the hole!
• 3. Awe and Wonder – What an amazing thing, to get this little ball into that small hole from so far away…
• 2. Contentment – I got the ball in the hole, now I’m happy. (Perhaps the 19^th hole has something to do with this…)
• 1. Creativity – Let me think about all of the different ways that I can get this little ball into that hole.

As she was talking through this list I started to think about how I felt when I was working on a programming problem. I don’t program so much in my job anymore, but I still love to do it. It’s one of the reasons I love working on BOB so much as it gives me a creative outlet for my coding energies, and a certain amount of price and contentment as I see the new code in use by so many people. Now let me repeat that statement with some words emphasized.

It’s one of the reasons I love working on BOB so much as it gives me a creative outlet for my coding energies, and a certain amount of pride and contentment as I see the new code in use by so many people.

There are four of the key emotional states provided by game playing that showed up in that statement, but programming isn’t really a game, is it? It turns out that it can be, and if it is, Dr. McGonigal suggests that we would all be happier and more productive at work. Who wouldn’t want to go to work for forty hours a week (ha, only 40? ) if we could play games all day? But she suggested that it is not just about being more productive at work, but saving the world.

Refocused Efforts

Many folks would say that’s not going to happen, that game playing is simply a waste of time. Dr. McGonigal said that worldwide 3 billion hours a week are spent playing online games. The entire wikipedia, including both content and the underlying code to run the system, took 100 million hours to create! In other words, if we could harness some of the energy and enthusiasm poured into online gaming (it takes 300 to 500 hours per person to get to 80th level in World of Warcraft, which is where the game starts to get fun), we could create 30 wikipedias. Each week.

What does this have to do with IT? Dr. McGonigal presented a number of statistics that showed how gamification or “Game IT” is becoming more interesting to companies around the globe. Most companies will tell you that their people are their most important resource. Gamification is the idea that if we can turn those people into a more energized and engaged workforce, that we will all benefit.

I get it, I think. There have been plenty of times (in my younger days) when I stayed up all night playing games. There have also been plenty of times when I’ve stayed up all night (still in my younger days) solving a particular coding challenge. What did the coding challenge have to do with playing a game? In each case I have an obstacle to overcome, either code that won’t work, or monsters occupying my space station on Mars. In each case I had to exercise creative thinking and try to apply different solutions. Sometimes my code didn’t work, and sometimes the monsters killed me. In each case I got to start over and take a different approach. When I finally solved the problem (code works, monsters eradicated) I felt a definite sense of accomplishment. These feelings can be powerful motivators. Dr. McGonigal calls this “epic wins” and they’re the primary source of those ten positive emotions listed earlier. As she says in her video, “There’s no unemployment in World of Warcraft.”

Gamification In The Real World

As a final point she presented two scenarios where gamification or game play is being used in the real world. The first scenario involved a speed camera at a particular intersection. If you’re not familiar with the concept, a speed camera is essentially an automated policeman that is on duty twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. It includes a radar or other speed measuring device, a camera, and access to the database that contains your license plate number as well as all of your personal data. If you exceed the speed limit through the area covered by the camera, your picture is taken (because they have to show it was you driving the car; they cannot ticket the car itself) and a ticket is sent off in the mail. That’s the normal process. At this particular intersection they reprogrammed the speed camera. Not only would it take pictures of speeders, but it would randomly take pictures of folks that were driving under the speed limit. Why?

Because each of those folks was awarded a bonus for driving under the limit. The amount of the bonus depended on the amount collected from speeders over the same period! It essentially became a game where safe drivers could win a share of the fines paid by those that were speeding. Over some period of time (I don’t think she said how long) the average speed through that intersection dropped 18.5%, resulting in a safer environment. Speeding tickets alone were not able to do that.

Dr. McGonigal went on to say that she didn’t feel like this particular game was a sustainable model, and I agree with her. What were speeds like in the area outside of this particular intersection? Were people slowing down overall? Or just at that one intersection? Were people going out of their way to drive through this intersection, therefore increasing traffic congestion, just for a chance at a winning ticket? One thing I’ve observed over the years is that human nature is quite predictable: if you provide an incentive or reward, especially a cash reward, then a certain subset of the population immediately goes about looking for ways to – can I say it? – “game” the system.

The second scenario she presented was also quite interesting, and as far as I can tell not really subject to abuse. It’s really a heart-warming story, and it involves kids playing the most popular sport on the planet: soccer. Yes, I can call it soccer, I’m an American. Of course the rest of the world calls it football.

I’ve seen pictures of kids all over the world playing soccer. Even if they have to make up a ball by wrapping a bundle of trash with tape or string they’ll do it. There were some undergraduate students at Harvard University that came up with this – quite literally – brilliant idea. Why not take the fact that these kids love to play soccer, and help them derive some tangible benefit from it? To do that, they figured out how to put a kinetic energy generator inside a soccer ball. (Read more at www.sOccket.com.) As the kids play soccer during the day, the ball is capturing the motion and using it to charge a set of batteries. During the evening, the kids’ families can plug in a small light that uses this energy and use it to see to cook, or read, or any other activity. The light attachment is an LED light so it lasts a very long time. It also draws very little power which means it couold last up to 24 hours. The sOccet can also power a small fan or – and for most people that could benefit from this I imagine this is by far the most useful benefit – a water sterilizer. All of this just from kids playing a game. The idea turns something that people want to do into a potentially life-saving event. Play some soccer, get clean drinking water.

Get Super Better

During her talk, Dr. McGonigal mentioned that her latest effort into social enhancement via game play was going to be coming out soon. The site is www.SuperBetter.com and the intent is to promote personal health.

SuperBetter is a game that helps you recover from any illness or injury — or achieve any health goal — by increasing your personal resilience. Resilience means staying curious, optimistic and motivated even in the face of the toughest challenges.

…

We believe that instead of being diminished by obstacles in our way, we can grow stronger—much stronger. In fact, science tells us that dramatic, positive changes can occur in our lives as a direct result of facing an extreme challenge—whether it be coping with a serious illness, daring to quit smoking, or dealing with depression. We call this getting SuperBetter!

I can see many of the attributes she mentioned in her talk in just that one paragraph. Instead of saving the world, we’re saving ourselves. By playing games. Epic Win.

Related Links

• Dr. Jane McGonigal on TED
]]> http://www.dagira.com/2011/09/15/sap-teched-2011-gamification-keynote/feed/ 1 http://www.dagira.com/2011/09/13/does-this-application-need-to-be-mobile/ http://www.dagira.com/2011/09/13/does-this-application-need-to-be-mobile/#comments Tue, 13 Sep 2011 23:30:15 +0000 Dave Rathbun http://www.dagira.com/?p=405 As mentioned earlier, one of the key themes mentioned in the morning keynote was (once again) mobile applications. Later on I saw a brief marketing video from SAP that showed off some of their mobile apps, and I started to wonder: were some of those apps mobile because they needed to be? Or because they were simply re-positioned from a desktop? And if so, where is the value? For example, one of the sample apps shown appeared to be an HR app used to approve expense reports. I can honestly say that I’ve never heard a request from our HR department saying they needed to do that via a mobile device. The same could be said for many of the other applications shown (however briefly) in the video.

Years ago I had a friend who started a company that was going to be based on the Internet. His idea would have been a very early front-runner in the social media space, although we didn’t know that at the time. Like many, his company disappeared during the “dot bomb” collapse. What really intrigued me about his idea, though, was that it was not a company that could be built on the Internet, it was a company that required the Internet in order to function. (The same could be said about most social media companies today which is why I said he was a front-runner in the space.) During the same time he was launching his idea, many other companies were trying to simply re-platform their brick-and-mortar offerings on the web, with various degrees of success. They didn’t require the Internet to function, they were just using it as a delivery device.

Today I’m starting to feel like I am seeing the same thing with mobile. Everybody seems to want to show off their mobile apps, but what they’re showing (at least a large percentage of the time) is a desktop app or common function that has been repositioned as a mobile app. It’s something that could be done equally well on either type of hardware. I don’t think anyone with a smart phone is going to be interested in giving up mobile access to their email, and that’s clearly a desktop app that has been re-platformed very successfully. Blackberry probably would not exist as a company today if not for the success of their mobile email devices. When I go out shopping, I frequently use Amazon or eBay as a price guide to see if a locally available item is priced competitively. That’s not a mobile app, though, that’s simply mobile access to data. I could do my comparison shopping at home, but it’s certainly convenient to have it on a mobile device.

I can get sports scores on my phone. I can get the same thing at home. Again, it’s convenient to have mobile access but it’s not mandatory.

Today I can deliver Web Intelligence documents over the Internet with the mobile platform in BI 4.0. That’s not really a mobile application, it’s an alternate delivery path for desktop content. The same thing could be said for the mobile version of Explorer.

In fact, I personally can’t think of a single thing that I currently do with my Blackberry that requires mobility. I just have a bunch of desktop applications in my pocket. There is value in that, but it’s not a very compelling (at least to me) mobility story.

How about you? Do you have any true mobile apps? Something that would not be possible any other way? Or are they simply desktop apps on a different device? Spreadsheets were the “killer app” for desktop computers. Email may have been an early force behind the growth of smart phones, but what’s the true mobile killer app that we can’t live without?

]]> http://www.dagira.com/2011/09/13/does-this-application-need-to-be-mobile/feed/ 2 http://www.dagira.com/2011/08/12/quick-tip-for-universe-designer-abends/ http://www.dagira.com/2011/08/12/quick-tip-for-universe-designer-abends/#comments Fri, 12 Aug 2011 17:01:27 +0000 Dave Rathbun http://www.dagira.com/?p=388 Not too long ago I had a very frustrating run where certain events (and I was never quite sure what the connection was) would cause my designer session to crash. For a while it was just exporting a universe. The universe would get exported successfully and then Designer would immediately crash. Then I started having problems with Desktop Intelligence where I could not edit documents related to a specific universe. The universe itself was fine, as I verified by going into the Infoview portal and creating documents. And others were able to use the universe just fine.

Ultimately I found a post on BOB that pointed me in the right direction. The seemingly “random” events all had to do with accessing the security areas of the repository, and that pointed to a corrupted .lsi file. These files have been around for many versions of the Business Objects software. Although I don’t remember ever getting a confirmation one way or another I have always called them the “local security information” files. This file is what lets Desktop Intelligence users work in offline mode as it contains a list of universes and documents and so on that the user has rights to. It makes sense that exporting a universe works because that’s not related to security. It’s only after the export was complete that the local security information file was updated, and since my file was corrupted in some fashion that update failed.

Removing the .lsi file for that particular environment solved the problem. There’s no harm in removing this file as Business Objects will automatically regenerate it the next time it’s needed when the program realizes that it is missing.

Where are the .lsi files? The location may be different based on how the software is installed, but they should be within the application folder that is contained within the Documents and Settings parent folder. Here’s the path for me under XI 3.1:

D:\Documents and Settings\username-here\Application Data\Business Objects\Business Objects 12.0\lsi

Once I deleted the .lsi file for the offending environment – I could have removed them all because they’re automatically regenerated if they’re missing – everything worked again. That being said, there are two files in that folder that should not be deleted, and those are pdac.lsi and sdac.lsi. Those files are used to store information related to personal (pdac) and shared (sdac) connections that have been defined on the client computer.

If you’re wondering what ABEND means, it’s short for “abnormal ending” and dates back to mainframe days.

]]> http://www.dagira.com/2011/08/12/quick-tip-for-universe-designer-abends/feed/ 3 http://www.dagira.com/2011/05/13/is-your-system-hot-or-cold-or-both/ http://www.dagira.com/2011/05/13/is-your-system-hot-or-cold-or-both/#comments Fri, 13 May 2011 17:08:28 +0000 Dave Rathbun http://www.dagira.com/?p=368 In a recent tweet I shared a short story (it’s on twitter, it has to be short!) about something I witnessed earlier today. I was in our break-room getting ready to eat lunch. I was waiting in line for my turn at the microwave when a person walked into the room, grabbed a cup, and filled it with ice from the ice-maker. That’s not so unusual. What caught my interest was what they did after that. They went to the coffer maker where there is a hot water spigot (for making soups or hot chocolate) and proceeded to cover the ice with super-heated water.

I was first amused as I thought to myself, “What’s the point?”

Immediately upon asking myself that question, I was reminded of a number of different BI solutions that I have been asked to deliver over the years. So many times I have been asked to provide a [report|database|reporting system|universe] that “includes everything” so that the business user can pick out what they’re interested in. Large reports or universes seldom reach critical penetration in the business simply because they try to do too much. If you want ice, get some ice. If you want hot water, get some hot water. But when you try to do both at the same time, you get neither. The result is simply a lukewarm puddle.

]]> http://www.dagira.com/2011/05/13/is-your-system-hot-or-cold-or-both/feed/ 2 http://www.dagira.com/2010/10/14/sap-name-changes-or-will-they/ http://www.dagira.com/2010/10/14/sap-name-changes-or-will-they/#comments Thu, 14 Oct 2010 13:45:00 +0000 Dave Rathbun http://www.dagira.com/?p=330 There is a wonderful summarized post by fellow SAP Mentor Jon Reed that outlines all of the new product name changes coming with the 4.0 release. There are a couple of interesting points that I wanted to emphasize; you can read the full post using the link below.

First, Web Intelligence was supposed to get a new name. We heard that over and over. Ultimately SAP went to a number of different groups and asked about the name changes. I was fortunate to be in one of those groups, and we told SAP in no uncertain terms that Web Intelligence was a name with market value, with history, and it deserved to stay. Especially given the new name of “Interactive Analysis” that was proposed. First of all, Web Intelligence does not have to be interactive. Second, it is not limited to analysis. And with the combination of Pioneer being re-branded as Advanced Analysis, we wanted to know what made Pioneer (a completely different tool designed for OLAP cubes) any more advanced than Web Intelligence? So the good news is that Web Intelligence will stay Web Intelligence, so score a point for us.

Ultimately they dropped the “advanced” from Advanced Analysis and went with SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for the combined BEx + Voyager aka Pioneer project.

Second, Xcelsius is going to be re-branded as SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards. I get it… I really do. SAP is a multi-national company and having product names that say what the product does is a clear advantage for naming. But with the rapid growth and acceptance of Xcelsius in the marketplace, why lose that name recognition? One excuse given is that the name is “too close” to the Excel base that Xcelsius was originally based on. I get that too.

Then again, maybe the Roambi folks will blow Xcelsius out of the water and we’ll all be arguing over what that product should be named once SAP buys it instead. And no, I’m not trying to start any rumors, nor do I have any inside information. And while I am on the subject, it’s pronounced “roam-bee” as in the insect, not “roam-B-Eye” as most folks seem to want to do.

Jon has provided a far more robust list of products and name changes, so be sure to check out his post linked below for the full story.

Related Links

• SAP BusinessObjects name changes by Jon Reed
]]> http://www.dagira.com/2010/10/14/sap-name-changes-or-will-they/feed/ 1 http://www.dagira.com/2010/08/30/what-does-personal-grooming-have-to-do-with-business-intelligence/ http://www.dagira.com/2010/08/30/what-does-personal-grooming-have-to-do-with-business-intelligence/#comments Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:40:55 +0000 Dave Rathbun http://www.dagira.com/?p=315 This post is a bit outside of my normal technical content. I was struck by something on the way home today and can’t get it out of my head until I write it down. For the past several years (since 2005, I think) I have had a beard. A few weeks ago, I shaved it off. Guys that have worn then removed beards will probably be able to answer this next question: What is the most common comment I receive from people that are seeing me for the first time without my long-time beard?

The number one comment is, “Nice haircut.”

The same thing seems to happen every time I switch from bearded to beardless. The fact is that I didn’t get a haircut. I shaved my beard. But people are creatures of habit. When something is different but not “different enough” it seems to be hard to properly discern the true change. People correctly identify that I have less hair. They incorrectly identify the source of the change.

Can the same thing happen with our reports? Sure. The correct result can be right in front of us, but we’re so accustomed to seeing things in a particular way that we can still derive the wrong conclusion even with correct data. What does this say about our ability to be successful in our attempts to convey critical information via our various business intelligence tools? How effective can a message be (even if it’s the correct message) if it is interpreted incorrectly?

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