Business Intelligence

I was recently in London, UK, at an international Biomass conference. It was attended by organizations both creating and supplying biomass fuels and those consuming them. The main biomass fuel used is compressed wood pellets made from parts of the tree that cannot be used for lumber. The wood comes …

I just got back from presenting at two in-person BusinessObjects User Group Meetings in Trenton, NJ and Philadelphia, PA. The Philadelphia meeting was held at the Philadelphia Zoo and included a free pass to the Zoo afterwards. I really enjoyed this Zoo because they really have gone all out to …

One of the reasons I am so fascinated by the Ancient Egyptian culture is that it was so far ahead of its time. Not only did it thrive for almost three millennia, but the Ancient Egyptians were advanced in mathematics, architecture, construction, agriculture, astronomy, medicine, legal systems, writing, art and …

So, for Part 4 of this blog series, I would like to review how you can leverage BusinessObjects to enable and accelerate tools like PowerBI.  There appears to be a general misunderstanding that organizations can save money by converting from BusinessObjects to PowerBI. Nothing could be further from the truth. …

Have you ever had the need to display a full year of data on a chart … even when you don’t have actual data to display? This is what we want to display: But this is what our data displays:   We used to use complicated work arounds to handle …

I was recently at a BusinessObjects user group meeting in Pennsylvania and a representative from SAP who was presenting asked the audience of about 50 attendees if any of them were using SAP Explorer. Not a single person raised their hand. He then asked how many of them had seen …

The recent Dresner 2021 Wisdom of the Crowds survey for Self-Service Business Intelligence showed that self-service BI ranked 6th in importance out of 44 topics. Guess what Number 1 was? Yup, Reporting was #1 on the list! Ten years ago, the BI industry experts and vendors were trying to convince us …

One of my favorite parts of the annual IBIS event is the Dashboard Awards as every year I love to see the amazing dashboard solutions organizations have created with BI tools. This year was no exception with 3 winners that again blew my socks off with both their business use …

The vast majority of BusinessObjects customers today are happily running some version of BI 4.2 and are stable and not looking to rush to upgrade to the next release (especially a relatively new one) any time soon. So why upgrade to BI 4.3? Well, like all previous releases of SAP …

The new and current SAP BusinessObjects release, BI 4.3, seems to come up in almost every conversation I have with customers these days so I thought I should blog about it. The last service pack of BI 4.2, SP09, was just released and will remain fully supported through to Dec. …