Business Intelligence Blog

For the last few years, we have been hearing about agility in business intelligence and the benefits of implementing the SCRUM framework. However, few businesses really implemented it.

I would like to take some time in this instalment of my dashboard blogs to relate the creative aspect of dashboard building. While dashboard development can be seen as putting up walls inside a house, the creative process would be the paint, the tasteful picture framed on the wall and the nice lamp that gives a room all its charms. This requires a process and specialized skills. The same is true for a dashboard project in order to obtain a similar "wow factor".

In most, but not all, dashboard projects, this factor is a great way to build engagement and branding for the audience. It can upscale the quality of the dashboard tool chosen and basically make a bland looking dashboard that much more appealing.

Just to clarify, when I refer to the creative process, it is NOT the act of using the right KPIs or the right visualisation. It is the act of DISPLAYING those elements inside an intuitive UI (User Interface) to offer an efficient and pleasing UX (User Experience).

• Plan the project: take into consideration the scope of the project, the time available according to the deliverables dates, the resources, the length of services downtime, the training, and the backups.
• Write down a « Checklist » that will validate the desired platform version and the system prerequisites, the  path used for the updates, the change in behavior of certain products, the existence of particular platform parameters, the security to be migrated, the content to be migrated, the complete or incremental update and the acceptance criteria.
• Foresee a pre-migration if necessary  because it is important to understand that previous versions to BO XI R2 must be migrated to BO XI R2/3.1 before passing to BO BI 4.0.

• BO BI 4.0 is a new installation, it cannot be added over an existing version
• New audit diagram, the old diagram cannot be used
• BI Workspace integrates under the same Infoview interface, Dashboard builder as well as public and personal folders
• Performance Manager; the encyclopedia and the discussion do not exist anymore

• Desktop Intelligence does not exist anymore
• All the Crystal Reports will be updated to the CR 2011 version
• The swf files coming from Xcelsius 2008 will continue to work, but a conversation is necessary in order to have access to dashboard design’s new functionalities
• Explorer does not support the information space on universes of UNV format anymore
• Web Intelligence does not support the SDK in the 4.0 version
• The UNV format universes must be converted in UNX format to be able to use the new functionalities

• The integration kits (SAP,PeopleSoft,etc) are included in the installation except for Sharepoint which will come later
• Mobile is included in the installation
• Data Federator is partially integrated

• Security validation: There are particularities to the XI R2 and XI 3.1 security which require additional manipulations such as adding ownership rights on all the products
• Do the inventory and filter it in order to reduce the perimeter and the complexity of the migration
• Evaluate if the migration will be incremental or complete according to the business context
• Establish the acceptance criteria for the migration

Hoping that we have covered all the aspects required for migration preparation, we invite you to send us items that we might have missed or even to share with us your personal experience of a BO BI 4.0 migration.
Good luck with your migration!

With time, many businesses realized that the quantity of data was growing significantly. Therefore, it became more and more crucial for organizations to get information quickly while ensuring an update of the most recent data. Unfortunately, these two elements are difficult to conjugate, so it is necessary to compromise. While trying to resolve these issues, SAP created HANA, their new database in-memory technology.

In our current IT industry the term agile is often referenced to iterative development: delivery in small components of business value, breaking down your project in sprints, holding your daily scrum meetings, having a scrum master, etc.

The gateways to dashboards are prompts. They serve to constraint and filter data that will be displayed to the user. They constraint and feed data into the dashboard so that the user can analyse a subset of the data so that new insights can be deduced.

We have been hearing of Big Data for several months now with definitions that vary depending on the context. In fact, during my analysis of the subject, I was able to determine that the problems of Big Data are the challenges created by the mass of information generated by the information ecosystem affecting the analytical performance required by the company.

There are several factors that favor SAP Xcelsius , the SAP BusinessObjects suite's visualization tool:

• it is easy to use
• the result is attractive
• there are a number of output formats.

However, when we do implementations in businesses, we find that there are certain elements that Xcelsius does a little less well. Fortunately, there are ways to overcome these shortcomings and to continue using this great tool.

This article explains how to solve a problem that often occurs during the making of a dashboard in Xcelcius. The problem lies in the selection / deselection of rows in a scorecard when a new selection is made ​​in another component of the dashboard.