About UsThe Decision Factor offers insightful comments and observations on analytics—from views on new technology approaches and market dynamics to the latest industry trends driving demand for faster, smarter information analysis. This blog contains personal views, thoughts, and opinions from SAP employees, mentors, and friends working in the area of analytics. It’s not endorsed by SAP nor does it constitute an official communication of SAP. |
Posted by: Mika Sissonen July 10, 2012  In October of last year, when Google+ was still only a few months old, a member of the nascent social network posted a long rant that received lots of media attention. He meant to share his post only with coworkers, but it went public instead – causing more than a little embarrassment for his company. Who was this person? A Google engineer, of all people.
Beyond the post’s content, the incident was curious in a broader way. It highlighted how contextual ambiguity can introduce risk into the everyday …
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Posted by: Steve Hamrick February 23, 2012  A case for the evolution of collaborative and social software
Six years ago, Harvard Professor and Enterprise 2.0 blogger Andrew McAfee theorized that emerging collaboration technologies needed to be “9X [nine times] better” in order to motivate people to switch from using email to collaborate. Yet even today, many of us suffer from email fatigue.
Why is this? Even with the advances in both consumer and enterprise social networking tools, email is still the fastest way to share information within any given organization or group of …
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Posted by: Henner Schliebs January 24, 2012  You didn’t receive the budget allocation for the year that you requested. So how you are you going to achieve your ambitious goals? There’s budget to be found, the trick is tapping into it. Re-friend other departments? What about the group covering the new topic that executive management is promoting heavily? They seem to have an endless budget. Do you know someone there? Can you tie your topic to theirs? Nope, they’re compensated on another product line, so there’s no motivation to support the project. Couldn’t management have known …
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Posted by: Brad Surak January 17, 2012  With the advent of the smartphone and multi-touch tablet, business people everywhere recognized the potential benefits of empowering workers with the right data, instantly accessible, wherever they are. That understanding is driving the first generation of mobile analytic adoption by industry leaders and helping us understand that we’re barley harnessing the power of this new form factor.
Bring Business Analytics Closer to the Action
A major criticism of business intelligence and advanced analytic technologies has long been that their use is generally restricted to a small number of people …
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Posted by: Holly Simmons November 8, 2011  Today’s social collaboration landscape is crowded and complex, and in this post I’ll be exploring key considerations for selecting the right solution for your business.
Many Flavors of Social Collaboration
There’s no shortage of options when it comes to selecting a social collaboration solution. Industry analyst group IDC, for example, offers seven different types of categories: team collaborative applications, social platforms, messaging applications, conferencing applications, integrated collaborative environments, supplier collaboration, and content management.
Similarly, industry analyst group Gartner has three Magic Quadrant reports …
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Posted by: Jack Miller November 3, 2011  Imagine booting your computer one morning and being presented with the three to five core tasks you need to complete that day. You click on the first item, and everything you need (tools; the latest sales report from your business intelligence (BI) system; notifications regarding a new CRM opportunity; an expense report requiring approval; and input from colleagues, partners, and/or customers) appears in a single workspace, where you can easily synthesize the information and take the next appropriate action.
Contrast that to today’s siloed work approach with several open …
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Posted by: Bil Khan October 25, 2011  Defining Collaboration and Compliance in the Context of the Processes—a Mandate!!!
The discussion between structured data and unstructured content is an old one and is becoming more and more irrelevant as the lines between the two keep getting blurred. There’s a growing realization that simply managing the exponential growth in unstructured content (i.e. emails, Word, PPT, PDF, video, and audio files, etc.) doesn’t produce an observable impact in the absence of business relevance. It’s like telling your employees to work for the next year on a huge project that …
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Posted by: Holly Simmons October 13, 2011  An interesting interview with Alan Morrison of PricewaterhouseCoopers Center for Technology and Innovation appears on the SAP Analytics blog. In the interview, Morrison discusses the collaboration paradox, how enterprise apps are out-innovating Facebook and LinkedIn, whether email is outdated, and other topics.
The interview does end with how SAP StreamWork fits into the new collaboration landscape, but the thought-leadership discussion around collaboration is too good not to share.
Read “What Can Companies Achieve with the Next Generation of Collaboration Tools?”
Posted by: Holly Simmons June 9, 2011
Gartner recently announced their 2011 list of top-10 strategic technologies for CIOs. Not surprisingly, cloud computing was at the top. Similarly, IDC predicted in late 2010 that cloud services would mature in 2011 with spending on public IT cloud services growing at five times the rate of the IT industry as a whole – up 30 percent from 2010.
Why Is IT Just Now Embracing Cloud Analytics?
Business people and small/mid-sized companies have been reaping the benefits …
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