While writing a paper about ALCM for HANA based applications, including ECC and which should also include how to manage operational reporting in ECC, I'm wondering now, how much the profile of the "classical" BI consultant will need to change within the next years. The path for a lot of applications
of SAP is to bring back reporting to where the data is created. And this is definitely a great thing. The decrease in complexity, primarily by the suppression of
replication, is a significant improvement for larger corporations. Furthermore, the data is available immediately as it is read, joined and transformed from the base tables of the application itself. HANA Live views are the first preconfigured template in order to do so. They are built purely with HANA artifacts and are
to be consumed by some of the SAP BI Frontend tools directly, by others like Webi by using universes.
One can assume that the functional requirements for Operational reporting will initially remain at least the same as defined within an analytical
platform that includes operational reporting. New analytical solutions will be possible after a switch to HANA, of course, but let us stay with the currently
available functionality.
So, what can that mean for the BI/BW consultants for the next years ? I came to the conclusion that for BW consultants that are working mainly in the
staging part should develop a strong understanding about the development of HANA artefacts and improve their knowledge about the DB layout of ECC. It will still be necessary to describe data transformation logic and implement it, "just with different means and approaches". In order to do that
properly, they will need to understand which types of modeling problems will be solved by which part of the whole "logic solution" stack including the frontend. In addition they need a deeper understanding of the technical implementation of ECC (DB layout). That was something some kind of hidden by the standard
extractors of BW.
For frontend developers it will be of importance to understand the evolution and the functionality of the newer frontend tools like Analysis, Design Studio
and Lumira. It is of importance for a front end developer to understand what logic will be put in which part of the overall data transformation path, which
starts at the base tables and ends when the data is visible on the screen of the end user. In addition, I think, it also will be of importance to follow the evolution of Embedded BW in OLTP environments. Without Embedded BW in an OLTP environment, the query designer and the current frontend tools of BEX will not work. However, this potential path includes some interesting challenges that need to be addressed. Another important aspect is the change from BW based visualization to newer ways of interacting with the data. But that's another story.
These thoughts are likely not complete or sufficently detailed in many aspects, but should just be a start for you, dear readers.
What do you think ?
Best, Philipp
