Altek Solutions Business Intelligence Blog

Connecting BusinessObjects to SAP

Following SAP’s big acquisition of BusinessObjects, more and more companies running SAP are looking to BusinessObjects as an answer for their reporting needs. The BusinessObjects tools WebIntelligence and Xcelsius are well suited for this role. However, getting SAP data into those tools is not yet as easy as SAP would like. For a variety of reasons, BusinessObjects Data Services is the tool of choice for extracting data from SAP. In this post I will explain how Data Services talks to SAP to extract data.

Underwhelm Your Users with a Well-designed Dashboard

Dashboard and visualizations are a hot topic right now. You can’t go to an SAP BusinessObjects event or a user group meeting without seeing over half of the presentations focusing on dashboards and visualizations. And, like with any cutting-edge technology, it seems everyone is trying to get in on the action. While that’s a good thing, sometimes people lack the basic knowledge and skills to utilize those tools to deliver effective analysis.

Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work (part 5): If I Give Them Ad Hoc Access to Data, They’ll Keep Asking For More

Back in March I posted “Five Reasons Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work In Some Organizations“.  In that post, I listed some of the major concerns that I hear from potential clients when the subject of ad hoc reporting is broached.  We’ve already addressed “Our people aren’t smart enough to create their own reports”,  “We [...]

Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work (part 4): I Pay People in IT to Create Reports

One of the other reasons I hear is that managers don’t want to train end-users to create reports, since they have folks in IT that already tasked with that. Some report authoring will always need to be handled by IT, due to it’s complexity, lack of data availability, etc… But I argue that the lion’s share of the development can be handled within each department instead, freeing IT developers to take on other projects critical to the organization.

Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work (part 3): I don’t want people poking around in data they shouldn’t have access to

Data security is typically a really a big deal for organizations, and it SHOULD be. Thankfully, SAP BusinessObjects offers a number of ways to provide security around functionality, content and data. With some careful planning and a well-designed SAP BusinessObjects implementation, you can rest assured knowing that users will have access to only the information that they are supposed to see.

Tips for Developing BI Extranets

Over the past eight years or so, we’ve developed a number of business intelligence extranets for our clients. One of our first solutions was developed on top of Business Objects 5.1, and we have touched virtually every subsequent release including Business Objects 6.1, Business Objects 6.5, Business Objects XI, and now…SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1. (We’ve even had the pleasure of updating several of these applications when the Business Objects SDKs were changed after the Crystal Decisions merger.)

When helping a client plan an extranet, there are a core set of guidelines that we always follow.

Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work (part 2): We Need to Massage the Data First

Back in March I posted “Five Reasons Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work In Some Organizations”. In that post, I listed some of the major concerns that I hear from potential clients when the subject of ad hoc reporting is broached. As promised, I will be addressing each of those concerns and showing how they can be overcome. We’ve already addressed “Our people aren’t smart enough to create their own reports.” Now let’s turn our attention to data, and look at “We need to massage the data first.”

Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work (part 1): Our People Aren’t Smart Enough

I recently posted an article titled “Five Reasons Why Ad Hoc Reporting Won’t Work In Some Organizations”. In that article, I listed some of the major concerns that I hear from potential clients when the subject of ad hoc reporting is broached. As promised, I will be addressing each of those concerns and showing how they can be overcome. Today, we begin with the first one: “Our people aren’t smart enough to create their own reports”

Making Your Measures Behave

Defining measures gets interesting because while they are tied to a high-level corporate goal, they also touch nearly every other aspect of the organization, making it a challenge sometimes to balance all of the competing interests. Plus, as soon as you start converting their behavior into numbers, people will simple adapt their behavior to have good numbers and may not deliver the overall results you had hoped.

If Google is Your Consultant’s Best Friend…RUN!

Being a consultant is easy. You create a website, get some business cards, and hang out your shingle. Being a good consultant is much more difficult. I want to call attention to how critical it can be to choose the right partner for your SAP BusinessObjects implementation, migrations and development projects.