BusinessObjects Holistic Healthcare

I recently had a stress fracture of the tibia (shin bone) in my left leg. I called the orthopedics department of a well-known healthcare organization to make an appointment.

After collecting all my personal details, the representative asked where the problem was located and I told her on the left shin bone. She said that they did not have a category for that and it needed to be foot, ankle, knee or hip for any leg issue. After some discussion, she decided to enter it as foot with a note that it was the shin. The system would not accept that so she put me on hold while she discussed it with someone else in the orthopedic department. After 10 minutes, she came back and asked me if the center of the pain was closer to the ankle or the knee. I explained it was exactly in the middle between the ankle and the knee. She went away for another 5 minutes and said she had managed to enter it as ankle!

While I understand that there are many different specialties and sub-specialties in healthcare today, it seems that important body parts, like shins, are not included and one needs to see either an ankle or a knee specialist.

This can also be the case for software support. Large software companies, like SAP, will have specialists for different areas of BusinessObjects like Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, IDT and semantic layer, BO Administration, SDK’s etc. but often the problem does not fall into any one of these but is across multiple areas or the whole deployment.

If your BusinessObjects deployment is running slow or intermittently deadlocks, you usually don’t know which area caused it. Even with traces and logs analyzed by SAP does not always identify the exact root cause.

Another issue is that usually SAP support will either advise you to upgrade to the latest release and service pack/fix pack or, if they provide a patch, it will only be available in the next latest fix pack. This causes problems for many customers who have very comprehensive deployments with hundreds of integrations since any upgrade often requires months of testing.

This is why so many BusinessObjects customers have opted for Managed Services agreements in the last few years. InfoSol, as a BusinessObjects partner with many highly experienced BO specialists and a technical partnership with SAP can often address all types of BusinessObjects issues. It does not matter if it is BO software, configuration, environment, application, data or operation, they have seen it all and can usually find get around solutions if a permanent fix is not immediately available.

They will also try to find a solution on your current version even if it is out of date or no longer supported.

These BO Specialists at SAP Partners are not just highly experienced across all parts of BusinessObjects, they have a wealth of knowledge in troubleshooting issues at all versions of the product.

Many BusinessObjects customers will have either a part-time or full-time BusinessObjects Administrator (very few have more than one) who will tend to be the in-house point of contact for all BO issues but it is often hard for that person to stay current with all the known problems, fixes, releases, features of BusinessObjects. They really need a back-up and BO Managed Services provides that and a lot more. It’s like an insurance policy for your BusinessObjects deployment.

The big question organizations need to ask themselves is how much downtime or disruption to the system costs me. InfoSol created a calculator to help you determine that so check it out.

I hope you have not experienced what I went through with the healthcare provider for my fractured shin with your BusinessObjects deployment, but if you have or you do, you may want to consider BO Managed Services.