The Best-Run Businesses Run SAP

Last week I attended one of the SAP Insider events, the one that combines Financials (Financials2012), Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC2012) and Human Resource Management (HR2012). I have to admit that HR was the odd man out here. (more…)

Recently I had the opportunity to speak with SAP’s Senior VP of Mobile Strategies, Nick Brown to get a preview of the “mobility” announcements planned for SAPPHIRENOW + SAPTechEd, co-located in Madrid this week. As anyone that follows SAP knows, mobility is one of its three hottest topics, the other two being cloud and in-memory computing. Since May 2010 when SAP announced its intended acquisition of Sybase, the mobility buzz has been about an integrated platform and application story. (more…)

A colleague and I were recently discussing a report by McKinsey Global Institute titled “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity”. I said I was surprised that it only mentions data quality once in the entire 143 pages. My colleague said it is meant to show executives the business value of the massive amounts of data being collected, and executives generally at best give data quality lip service.

I have to admit I got a little upset and got on my soapbox about how information integrity was the foundation for getting business value from data. I used the spreadsheet example to validate my point of view that executives should care about information integrity.

(more…)

Many companies are using spreadsheets in their revenue recognition and reporting process, despite the fact that they acknowledge the risks associated with the use of spreadsheets such as data and calculation errors, lack of security and control, and lack of auditing. I find this troubling because spreadsheet risks
violate basic compliance principles and revenue accounting problems are one of the leading causes of financial restatements.

Part of the problem is the fact that most organizations don’t have a single source of clean revenue data. BI can help companies consolidate and validate revenue data across multiple sources such as ERP & CRM modules, billing systems, order management systems, project management systems, and price books.

(more…)

Location has always been part business intelligence. You want to see sales by product by region. Then drill down to country, state or city. What’s new is the way location is visualized by overlaying the BI numbers onto geospatial maps.

Maps provide an intuitive visualization that aids in the communication of information about behavior and events based on where the objects or individuals are (more…)