Leo/Hasso 2

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE is the #1 priority of Gartner, (Feb 2009), SAPPHIRE and ASUG (May 1-14). Not a coincedence at all.

By Feb 2009 1,500 CEO's told Gartner that BI was their #1 priority for the 2009-12 period.

In May SAP reconfirmed this with statements from Leo Apotheker, Bill Mcdermott and Hasso Plattner, who is the original icon of SAP, that SAP is focusing totally on Analytics.
Their keynotes reverberated across all SAP corridors.

When talking to various customer managers, at the conference, opinions swung like a pendulum.

On one side of the swing were managers that basically wanted to hear how SAP could assist them during this time of crisis and felt that ‘Hasso just promised another pie in the sky for the future..’

On the other side of the swing were managers who realized that they needed ‘self-serive’ information to sustain the current financial crisis. A number of them are implementing the dream of Hasso – Polestar/ BO Explorer.

BO Explorer is nothing but Polestar and Polestar is kind of dependent on BW Accelerator to meet the Leo/Hasso vision with large data volumes. BW Accelerator is still dependent on SAP BW, and to BW InfoCubes. (refer to my paper on positioning the Infocube for SAP BW'
To enable the Leo/Hasso dream we need to finetune and optimize every widget in these above layers.

Within Business Intelligence there are two critical areas Leo/Hasso focused on:-
1. Business Objects and
2. BW Accelerator

Some of the key issues Hasso focused on, plus my commets
1. Business Intelligence is extremely important ( Information driven companies will be the market leaders of tomorrow.
(My comments: Information MUST be what business needs and not just reports. conduct a BVA audit on all Information Deliveries)

2. Business Needs need to drive analytics
(My comments: Business Must take Ownership, Accountability and Audit all BW Deliverables)
3. Optimize Self Service to under 1 second: Hasso took self-service to a new level. Answer any question you can think of. The managers can once again sit in a cockpit environment and get any answer to their operation. I love the concept I am sceptical as to its delivery potential based on my past experience with DW's, especially the technology promises and business delivered.
(my comment: I remember seeing something similar from Hasso and SEM back in 2008-9 so am once again skeptical to this idea. challenge the operational aspects of it. In fact Hasso had shown his hand and promised answers on your fingertips from BW – a move he repeated and confessed to repeating, in the 2009 conference. From my point of view self service analytics, and even Polestar is all about modeling. Using automated modeling we can deliver Hasso’s dream today. The issue with todays speed is not the technology it is the application, or lack of it thereof, that is the real issue. Without a accelerator or automated modeling I have personally reduced a SAP R/3 query runtime from 10 hours to under 9 minutes. Just with modeling I have reduced a query response time from 722 seconds to under 23 seconds in 4 hours flat. So we need to review business needs and modeling a little more seriously before we put all our budgets into the technology basket once again)

4. Collect all operational data into BW Accelerator: We must take all operational data into the BI environment so we can ask any question and the BO Explorer will answer it under a second. (My comment: Here is where Hasso and I have a deep devide. This is a technology data modeling answer with data as the center of the universe and very little business alignment. From a technology side hasso confessed this is experimental and if SAP invests and then it will work. From my business practical side I see three fundamental issues with this approach
(1) Management does not need simple answers which have existing attributes (Leo used Head – the system did not have Knees and could not have answered that if required);
(2) BW Accelerator has sponsored by business for Intuitive analytics (Something is not right with a number and I need to slice down, across and sideways to find answers);
(3) The issue from the beginning has been architecture and modeling and we have proven that if these are done right most of what Hasso displayed could be answered with current technology.)
(My comment2: The issue has never been technology but building a BVA (Business Value Attainment BW ). 90% of questions that can be answered by today’s technology remain unanswered due to bad design and modeling. How then do we assure that bad design is not going to mothball this dream. WE NEED TO START WITH THE BASICS AND IMPROVE THAT. Then everything on top aligns automatically)

5. Eliminate redundancy: Hasso clearly pointed out that we need to eliminate duplication of data and mainly master data.
(My comment: From a BW point of view we also need to eliminate non reporting elements from the BW. There are tolls that can do this automatically now)

6. Eliminate the need for a data warehouse as we know it: Hasso did elude, if I heard correct, the possibility to take all operational data directly into the the Accelerator.
(My Comments: I am not a supporter for Data collection and even if we did that then that would currently possibly need 70 to a 100 BW Accelerator Blades. I am more for of a modeling person that likes to select the the elements in my data warehouse and convert them into information objects rather than calculate them at the time of query. Unless Hasso and his team have found a new algorithm them I stand corrected. )

I think the Leo/Hasso have a wonderful vision and the fact that it is supported by 1,500 CEO’s across the planet who independently to Gartner in 2009 and placed BI as their #1 priority and Self Service Queries as their #1 priority in BW. (For more details read my whitepaper BI forecast for 2009-12).
I am fully committed to realizing the goals of the leo/Hasso vision as this is the quest that started me on BI 14 years ago when I was the group marketing manager for SCC a multinational cable and Wire manufacrurer.

Information is business critical, information at the speed of market change is imperative to business success.
Strategically 5 years from today the successful companies will be defined by those that have better and faster information than their competition.
Information leaders will defacto become business leaders.

If we look at 2009 then we need to support the vision of Leo and Hasso. We need business to own and audit BI developments, automate BI Modeling, automatically convert reporting DSO's into InfoCubes and make them non-reporting, get better visibility ino the BWA with a BW Accelerator Workbench, we need to automate modeling for Polestar for at that level human interpretations cannot work.
Basically we need to automate all complex human interpretations into an engineered science

Dreams yesterday, reality today and Routine Tomorrow