SAP TechEd d-code Viz-a-thon, What Happened in Vegas won't stay in Vegas ?

[Former Member]

On Tues 21/10 at SAP TechEd d-code Las Vegas there was an evening community session supporting Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).  Even after a long day at TechEd over 50 people came along to assist MSF gaining insight from their internal datasets using SAP Lumira.

Megan McGuire, eHealth Unit Coordinator at MSF, kicked off the evening sharing information about MSF and how they help people worldwide where the need is greatest, delivering emergency medical aid to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters or exclusion from health care.

The attendees were split up into mixed ability groups each with a “Lumira Expert” from SAP to support them.  The great thing about these group was the diversity of age, general technical experience and SAP Lumira expertise. The task set to each team was to draw insights from datasets provided by MSF to research into the factors that can affect to staff retention and other issues.  Teams were given 1 ½ hours to dig into the datasets and build stories to share. After about 2 hours each team was given an opportunity to share their insights with the wider attendees, and interestingly the stories uncovered in the data provided were different in each team.

My team went to “Hit it out of the park” doing some advanced things but failed (yep myself and Greg Myers) only to be saved by Chris Kernaghan who just plugged away creating great interactive data visualisations.  What’s great here is that Chris was a complete beginner using Lumira before the evening and picked it up so well in the 1 ½ hours we eventually came 2^nd in the light hearted competition.

What impressed me most was how the attendees many of whom had ZERO experience of SAP Lumira before the evening started easily drawing out insights from the data using SAP Lumira to help the great cause Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières  At the end of the evening Megan McGuire took away all the visualisation and storyboards in Lumia to take back and share with her colleagues to assist and inspire them

Credit where credit is due, thanks goes out to Marilyn Pratt for organising the evening, Sue Keohan for the tireless fundraising efforts, and all the SAP Lumira team for staying on to support the attendees.

Check out the blog by Marilyn Pratt titled I Care, I Gave, I Inspired and enter into a Mission on SCN