Picking the Wrong Tool from the BI Toolbox

The SAP BI product portfolio is big. We encounter reporting tools, dashboarding tools, and data discovery tools. Some support mechanization while some support on demand analysis of data. Given the sheer multitude of these tools and the complacency of developers in either a) being bound to the tools in the portfolio they are licensed for […]

Complex Calculations Made Simpler with Web Intelligence

There are many hidden talents within Web Intelligence that can assist with massaging your data and bringing out relationships within your numbers without ever having to export your data outside to another tool, such as Microsoft Excel. One of those underutilized functions is PREVIOUS(). It simply returns the previous value of an object.   While Web […]

The Day that Derby Died

Bye, bye Ms. American Pie… and all that jazz. Chalk one up in the win column! One of the smaller bullets in the “What’s New” document for SAP BI4.1 Support Pack 03’s release was the removal of the Apache Derby database usage by the Promotion Management app within the BI Platform. I railed about Derby […]

Making Smarter BI User Adoption KPIs

There has been a lot said lately across industry research  blogs, and the twitter-verse about the future shape and direction of BI   Almost two years ago, now, I suggested at the Mastering SAP Business Analytics conference in Melbourne that fundamentally, the way we measure BI user adoption is not so simple as calling tool usage a good […]