Attended BusinessObjects Information Management Services Academy, Oct 5-8 2009

This week, I attended a workshop organized by BusinessObjects Information Management Servicess Academy. It was a four days hands-on workshop with BusinessObjects consultants flying in from Australia and Singapore. There were professionals from other System Integrators as well.

The agenda for the workshop was -

• Connecting to sources
• Data Assessment
• Data Validation
• Implementing Change Data Detection
• Implementing Delta Loading
• Implementing Slowly Changing Dimension
• Working with Global Address Cleanse
• Working with Data Cleanse
• Universal Data Cleanse: Creating a Custom Parser (for custom Data Cleansing)
• Using Match
• Implementing Consolidation
• Working with Candidate Select
• Implementing Real-time (Global Cleanse and Candidate Select)

We copied a 50 GB VMware image of Windows 2003 server on our laptops. It had all the necessary software and data. So setup was not complicated but copying 50 GB image took good amount of time.

I liked the data quality transforms that Data Services offers specially GlobalAddressCleanse transform. It basically cleans the incoming addresses are per the inbuilt address dictionary. Currently, they have address dictionaries for US, EMEA, New Zealand and Japan. Soon they are going to come up with a similar dictionary for Indian addresses.

Overall, I would say it was a good experience :) .

How To Use BusinessObjects Data Services in SAP BI staging process

Some time back I had published a wiki page on SAP SDN on how BusinessObjects Data Services platform can be used with SAP BI. The same page has been published on SAPTechnical.com. The direct links can be found below -

SDN Wiki Page

SAPTechnical.com

Social Network Analyser from SAP

I was browsing the Business Objects contents on SAP Community Network and came across a cool prototype that SAP is building. It is called as Social Network Analyser Prototype.

The good thing here is that it uses the enterprise data to build a social networking place. It helps by making the corporate relationships quickly visible/available and provides information about your colleagues.

SAP says - 
The purpose of this technology is to deliver an environment where people can easily and quickly analyze corporate network relationships and find the information they are looking for in their daily jobs. The social network analyzer prototype lets you import and aggregate all the business network relationships between people that are already recorded in your business applications, such as:

• Management hierarchies from your human resources system
• Data on who worked on which deals, from your sales force automation system
• Partner, customer, and partner supplier contacts along your supply chain system
• People who work on similar transactions or projects within your operational systems

I could think of two benefits of having such a tool for an organization

1) I have experienced, being a PMO, sometimes it is very difficult to find out whether we have anyone with a particular skill in our organization, does anyone have prior experience on some problem, etc. Such information is very critical and can affect the way we deliver to our end clients. It is also frustrating that even if there are people in the organization who can help you out, you are simply not able to track them.

Having a Social Network Analyser or similar tool, can help you identify the right person and save a lot of time. Data is always reliable as it is fetched directly from the Business Applications.

2) Wouldn't it be of help if you know your team before you actually begin to work with them ? I think it is a great thing. More the team knows about itself, more productive it would be. It is fun for me to know hobbies, past work experiences, skills of my colleagues which i think improves the team dynamics :).

SAP has made available demo version of the prototype with a preconfigured dataset. Check it out.

Basics - Google's AdWords auction

A good video on how Google's AdWords works. It is a very clever business model without compromising on user experience.

Have a look.

Offline Gmail !!

Recently I came across this cool new feature from Google Labs about having your Gmail offline !

I tried it out over the weekend and it is really impressive. It asks users to install Google Gears. Gears is a plug-in that extends your browser to create a richer platform for web applications. Once installed, it starts the synchronization. It instantly makes the most recent mails available offline. You can stop the sync anytime and resume later. 

When you lose the internet connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode. You can also compose e-mail while offline and Gears will store it in the outbox. Once connected, it will send out the e-mails automatically. So you can write mails without worrying about the internet connectivity.

I had used Gears briefly last year while working on an interesting prototype of making web apps available offline and over Blackberry devices. We were able to get our Web 2.0 application working over Blackberry but could not complete getting it offline using Gears.

Now that I'll have my Gmail offline, I am looking forward to how this will change the way I use Gmail :)

Delivering software as a service (SaaS)

SaaS has always been very interesting topic for me. I have been learning a lot about this model by browsing various sites over the internet. It all started when I heard of salesforce.com for the first time.

I am a subscriber of The McKinsey Quarterly and recently I came across an article Delivering software as a service. I liked the way authors have analysed this model in the article. Below are some highlights :-

• Software as a service offers a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)
  
• Providers can now share one application cost effectively across hundreds of companies - a vast improvement on the old client-server model. 
• Bandwidth costs continue to drop, making it affordable for companies to purchase the level of connectivity that allows online applications to perform gracefully. 
• Many customers are eager for the shift, as they’re frustrated by the traditional cycle of buying a software license, paying for a maintenance contract, and then having to go through time-consuming and expensive upgrades.
  
• Although software-as-a-service vendors are less profitable than some traditional software vendors today, this gap is primarily caused by a lack of scale. Change in the economics of online delivery is expected as the model gains wider acceptance.
  
• Probable trends for migrating various categories of applications to SaaS model have been categorized into what they call three waves.
• SaaS is a threat to BPO vendors

I feel SaaS is the way to go forward for Enterprise Applications. I hope that the SaaS model would systematically address the reliability and security risks to make CIO and IT managers feel more comfortable with it.

SAP PMO Lead - My new role

Project Management Office(PMO) is a new experience for me. This is managerial role. It deals with the consolidated and corporate view of "SAP as a platform" across my organization.

My respsonsibilites are

1. Managing corporate level SAP initiatives
2. Help/guide different verticals with their SAP related needs
3. Interact and co-ordinate with the SAP India/SAP AG.
   

There are some benefits associated with this role:

1. I get to interact with lots of people across the organization. This results in the increased visibility
2. Involvment in the pre-sales and proposals stage
3. Management experience in the field of IT