The release of SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 points SAP in a new direction for Business Analytics, listen to Stephanie Buscemi discuss what Business Analytics means for customers.

Listen to Sanjay Poonen talk about the direction for Business Analytics at SAP:

Check out these slides on Business Analytics:

Business Analytics Overview

http://www.slideshare.net/SAPanalytics/business-analytics-overview 

Stay connected with SAP BusinessObjects 4.0

www.sap.com/analytics 

www.facebook.com/sapanalytics 

www.twitter.com/businessobjects 

more on the SAP Business Analytics blog: http://blogs.sap.com/analytics 

Great blog post today over at Harvard Business Review entitled "Why Your Customers Don't Want to Talk to You".  Finally, some bona fide research that supports my long held belief that customer self-service is way more than just a leftover fad from the dot com era but is more of a cultural evolution that is now past its tipping point.

Here are a few of my favorite gems from Matt Dixon's and Lara Ponomareff's blog post and referenced HBR article: (emphasis is mine)

"...we've found that corporate leaders dramatically overestimate the extent to which their customers actually want to talk to them. In fact, on average, companies tend to think their customers value live service more than twice as much as they value self service. But our data show that customers today are statistically indifferent about this — they value self-service just as much as using the phone. And guess what? By and large, this indifference holds regardless of their age, demographic, issue type, or urgency."

It really just stands to reason, regardless of your industry, if people go home at night to Amazon, Netflix and Online Banking, when they come in to work in the morning, they bring those user expectations with them.  Someone is buying all of those smartphones and ipads and they aren't just teenagers looking to post to Facebook!  I've written about this quite often in the past.

"This attitude toward self-service has been a long time coming. Two-thirds of the customers we surveyed told us that three to five years ago, they primarily used the phone for service interactions. Today, less than a third do, and the number is shrinking fast." 

My 29 year old semi-luddite daughter recently shared her eureka moment about why she is making fewer phone calls than she ever has.  It has to do with the pressure of being engaged in a synchronous conversation.  She would much prefer not having to confront another human being in real time.  There is too much pressure to say the right thing and ask the right question and react appropriately.  Asynchronous media (texting, email, chats, websites) are much more to her liking because she can take her time thinking about her responses.  I told her all that was well and good for her business and friends, but that wasn't getting her off the hook from speaking with me on the phone :-)

"...maybe customers are shifting toward self service because they don't want a relationship with companies."

All of the input we get from our interactions with our client's customers is that they simply want to have the product they desire, shipped to them on time and at the agreed upon price.  They would much prefer not spending anytime on the phone with their suppliers, because if they did, it usually wasn't to learn about new products but to resolve issues they have with existing orders...wrong product shipped, delivery times too long, etc. etc. 

Which reminds me of growing up in NYC in the 60's and 70's.  My parents often took me to visit their cousins, Fanny and George in Brooklyn.  Fanny and George, and their two kids, did nothing but fight with each other during our entire stay.  My mother said that it only looked like they were fighting when in actuality they really loved each other.  My take on that?  If arguing like that defines a "relationship", than I'd rather not have one.  Looks like my world view was prescient.

The most disturbing finding of the author's research was this:

"We found that a staggering 57% of inbound calls come from customers who first attempted to resolve their issue on the company's website. And over 30% of callers are on the company's website at the same time that they are talking to a rep on the phone. That's a lot of frustrated customers."

The wrong conclusion to draw from this observation is that it's better not to put up a web channel until you can get it perfect...because you never will.  Web channels are the best "checks" you have in the "Plan-Do-Check-Act" cycle of continuous improvement.  Without a web channel, all those inbound phone calls are your "Checks" and "sticky notes on your CSR's cubicles" are the results.  Having a web channel (or opening up your Kimono to your customers) will force you to "Act" more appropriately...clean up your business processes and make sure that SAP is configured appropriately and that your Master Data is accurate. 

It's a scary thing, but it's the right thing for every business to commit to.

In the end, it's best to reserve conversations with your customers to collaborating on new products and services and maybe even wishing them a happy birthday.  Let your SAP integrated web channel do the heavy lifting of transacting the day to day business with them.

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/20293%3Futm_source%3Dtwitterfeed%26utm_medium%3Dtwitter%26utm_campaign%3DFeed%253A+SAPNetworkWeblogs+%2528SAP+Network+Weblogs%2529

Last week, SAP BW 7.3 has been released in a beta version. This is just the upbeat for the launch of the next big version of BW which is planned for later this year. This will provide major new features to the existing, more than 20000 active BW installations which make it one of the most widely adopted SAP products. I like to take this opportunity to highlight a few focus areas that shape this new version and that lay out the future direction.

First, let me sift through a notion that many find helpful once they have thought about it, namely EDW = DB + X. This intends to state that an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) sits on top of a (typically relational) database (DB) but requires additional software to manage the data layers inside the data warehouse, the processes incl. scheduling, the models, the mappings, the consistency mechanisms etc. That software - referred to as "X" - can consist of a mix of tools (ETL tool, data modeling tools like ERwin, own programs and scripts, e.g. for extraction, a scheduler, an OLAP engine, ...) or it can be a single package like BW. This means that BW is not the database but the software managing the EDW and its underlying semantics.

In BW 7.3, this role becomes more and more apparent which, in turn, is also the basic tint for its future. I believe that this is important to understand as analysts and competitors seem to focus completely on the database when discussing the EDW topic. Gartner's magic quadrant on DW DBMS as an instance of such an analysis; another is the marketing pitches of DB vendors who have specialized on data warehousing like Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum and the like. By the way: last year, I did describe a customer migrating his EDW from "Oracle + Y" (Y was home-grown) to "Oracle + BW" which underlines the significance of "X" in the equation above.

But let's focus on BW 7.3. From my perspective, there is 3 fundamental investment areas in the new release:

• In-memory: BWA and its underlying technology is leveraged to a much wider extent than previously seen. This eats into the "DB" portion of the equation above. It is now possible to move DSO data directly into BWA, either via a BWA-based infocube (no data persisted on the DB) or via the new hybrid provider whereby the latter automatically pushes data from a DSO into a BWA-based infocube.
  More OLAP operations can be pushed down into the BWA engine whenever they operate on data that solely sits in BWA. One important step torwards this is the option to define BWA-based multiproviders (= all participating infoproviders have their data stored in BWA).
• Manageability: This affects the "X" portion. Firstly, numerous learnings and mechanisms that have been developed to manage SAP's Business-by-Design (ByD) software have made it into BW 7.3. Examples are template-based approaches for configuring and managing systems, an improved admin cockpit and fault-tolerant mechanisms around process chains. Secondly, there is a number of management tools that allow to easily model and maintain fundamental artifacts of the DW layers. For example, it is now possible to create a large number of identical DSOs, each one for a different portion of the data (e.g. one DSO per country) with identical data flows. Changes can be submitted to all of them in one go. This allows to create highly parallelizable load scenarios. This has been possible in previous releases only at the expense of huge maintenance efforts. Similarly, there is a new tool which allows graphically model data flows, save them as templates or instantiate them with specific infoproviders.
• Interoperability with SAP Business Objects tools: Now, this refers to the wider environment of the "EDW". Recent years have seen major investments to improve the interoperability with client tools like WebIntelligence or Xcelsius. Many of those have been provided already in BW 7.01 (=EhP1 of BW 7.0). Still, there are a number of features that required major efforts and overhauls. Most prominently, there is a new source system type in BW 7.3 to easily integrated "data stores" in Data Services with BW. It is now straightforward to tap into Data Services from BW. Consequently, this provides a best-of-breed integration of non-SAP data sources into BW.

This is meant to be a brief and not necessarily exhaustive overview of BW 7.3. A more detailed list of the features can be found on this page. Over the course of the next weeks and months the development team will blog on a variety of specific BW 7.3 features. This links can be found on that page too.