Auditing SAP Dashboards in BI4

If you have been following me in the community enough you know I’m a system statistics nerd. I love Auditor. I wrote Sherlock with my buddies because I love system statistics. And, with the release of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.0 (BI4), we have new stuff to audit!

Working with a customer rolling out SAP BusinessObjects for the first time, we (shockingly) were experiencing performance nightmares with SAP Dashboards. You don’t want dashboards that load in more than a handful of seconds. Many of you may scoff that this is impossible, but I’ll argue any day that a dashboard shouldn’t take 30 seconds to load. Yet, this is not the purpose of this post. Let’s talk about auditing dashboards.

End of the Road for Dashboards?

@ca_nicholls threw out an interesting tweet on August 1:

In memory capability will make dashboards obsolete, statement just made by SAP CEO Aus & NZ. Do you agree? I don’t.

This tweet has certainly piqued the interest of more than just a few at this point. It’s a pretty bold statement. Could it be a misquote? It’s possible. I definitely do not mean to discredit or disrespect @ca_nicholls in any way by that question, but let’s consider that he got it spot on…

For the record…I don’t think dashboards are going anywhere, but let’s talk about it.