The benefits of a datawarehouse are not easily quantifiable.
It is therefore good to see, that the UvA, winner of the prestigious Deloitte Kordes Annual Report Award 2014 in the category Education, refers to their datawarehouse as an important element for winning this award.
Click here for the full message (Dutch).
In conclusion: A good datawarehouse increases the quality of the Annual Report.
The University of Amsterdam is live, for several months now, with the new major release of UvAdata, the management information system of the UvA. As external project manager and BI consultant I had the pleasure to contribute to the success of this project.
Introduction
UvAdata is an enterprise datawarehouse that consolidates data across the University concerning Education, Research, Finance and HR with the main goal to support decision making for managers. It provides a single, comprehensive source of the current and historical information, based on a standardized data model and common definitions and semantics. UvAdata is within the University of Amsterdam the single version of the truth. Users have acces to the data using a BI application build with SAP Business Objects Design Studio 1.3.
The UvA uses for more than 10 years SAP BW as the enterprise datawarehousing tool, and has slowly but steady invested in expanding and consolidating datasources. Over the years this has resulted in more than 100 reports, with each adding insight in presenting the data. After 10 years, all these insights are bundled into best practices, and the technical upgrade from SAP BEx WAD3.5 to the latest tool SAP BO Design Studio has been used to improve the business user experience.
The goal of this release was to improve on:
Easier to find reports
With more than 100 reports, it is not easy for users to find the right report.
In the new release the startscreen represents the most significant report area’s with tiles. With a mouse over is shown what type of reports are behind the tile. After pressing the tile small pictures of the reports are shown. When these are pressed, the reports start. Finding reports has become easy and intuitive.
Easier to use
The UvA has used SAP Design Studio to implement the reports in this release. Together with users a template has been developed, to establish an easy to use interface. The requirements are that the interface is easy enough for irregular users, but has enough options for frequent users. The first reactions on ‘easy to use’ have been positive, especially compared to the old ‘context menu’, which for a lot of uses was to complex. In fact, in the latest release (DS1.4), the ‘context menu’ is available again, but at the UvA it will not be used as an opion.
Also with the development of the template, some rules have been defined on how to build meaningful reports, especially the use of graphs has been reviewed using the books of Stephen View. This means 3D graphs, pie charts and a lot of silly graphs have been avoided.
Apart from the interface, big improvements have been made in making the reports easier to understand by declining the use of jargon and departments specific terminology. And finally, the Wikipedia that serves as the help function, has been improved.
Clear report categories
The management information system had grown over the years. For users it was not always clear what type of report they were looking at. In the new release a report is now one of following three categories:
1. Dashboards
– Only filtering possible
– Norms, goals and contracts, compared with actuals
– Primary the user group is academic management
2. ‘Dossiers’
– Primary user group is staff
– Single purpose reports
3. MAD reports
– Primary user group is everybody interested in gaining insight on a certain topic
– Monitor, Analyse, Detail (see blog)
By dividing the reports in these categories, several purposes have been served:
Provide information for the academic management
– Information is ready when needed, up to date, reliable, consistent and agile -> Dashboards & MAD reports
Contribution to the professionalization of the management culture
-Common language on definitions -> Dashboards
Contribution to professionalization of the academic support
-Saving time in the collection of data; -> Dossiers
-Opportunities to seek relationships analysis -> MAD reports
Contribution to enhancing the quality of the administrations;
-Errors are more likely to be detected -> MAD reports
With this new release, the UvA has made a significant step in supporting the UvA management with management information.
In conclusion: the new release focused on the improvement of three major topic’s: Easier to find reports, Easier to use and Clear report categories.
The University of Amsterdam is live, as of today, with the new major release of UvAdata, the management information system of the UvA. As external project manager and BI consultant I had the pleasure to contribute to the success of this project.
The goal of this release was to support the UvA management by:
These goals had been defined after a user survey, that researched the use of the UvAdata system.
I will explain in detail the goals in the next blog.
With this new release, the UvA has made a significant step in supporting the UvA management with management information.
In conclusion: another successful SAP BI implementation in Higher Education
In May 2014 SAP made Design Studio version 1.3 general available. On time, as promised. But is this the release we have all been waiting for?
In short: unfortunately no. It is definitely an improvement, but still there is a lot to desire.
There is quite some ground to cover before the tool is as rich in functionality as the Web Application Designer. In this release it feels to me a lot of functionality is added that is useful in SAP Marketing (HANA, Lumira, all the buzz words are there).
BW Integrated Planning support
A lot of effort has gone into enabling the planning functionality, SAP BW- Integrated Planning. It is a nice feature, and definitely one that should be in place someday, but to me it would seem one with less priority. The current WAD solution will be supported for some while, thus why bother moving to Design Studio? Also, adding comments is currently only possible with an SDK component, thus adding hassle for those customers who want to use it.
Native Hana deployment
It is now possible to deploy Design Studio native on HANA. Of course very important for the long term strategy of SAP, ‘everything can be run on HANA’. But currently most HANA deployments are BW-on-HANA, thus this could have waited.
Design Studio SDK on Netweaver
Nice feature for the Netweaver users, they do not have to install a BO server. Unfortunately, if they want to use bookmarking and personalization, they still have to do that.
Application bookmarking and personalization
This was a feature I was looking forward to. As such it works quite well, but it has some drawbacks. First of all, it only works in local mode or on the BO server. Second, when the report is updated (i.e. because of an request for change) all the users lose their favorites. And finally, favorites are not stored centrally, in the sense that a user can organize his favorites in one spot. Also, I am not sure where on the BO server all these favorites are located. So I wonder how administrators will be able to clean irrelevant entries. For the Netweaver users, I hope a solution for that environment will be presented as well.
Lumira (CVOM) SDK integration
Lumira is of course a tool that will be part of every BI tooling strategy, someday, so it is good to know that there is integration with Design Studio.
Charting extensions
Some new charts have been added, and it is easier to modify certain options. Unfortunately, a lot of the new chart types are of the category ‘silly graphs best avoided’ and the options are still very limited, compared to the possibilities in the Web Application Designer. But hopefully improvement will continue in this field.
Advanced table formatting and customization
Nice features have been added, thus more is possible. Well done.
Printing
The added printing functionality is very limited, it is just a button that starts the webbrowser printing functionality. With the SDK this was a very easy thing to implement already. I hope we will get some improvement in this area in the coming releases. It feels strange that Anno Domini 2014 printing is still an issue.
Advanced Scripting
It is now possible to do some loops in the scripts. Already a big improvement. Well done. Keep up the good work.
So all-in all, a lot has been done in 6 months. Well done. If SAP can keeps up this momentum, Design Studio will become better and better.
In conclusion: Design Studio 1.3, not the release that changes everything, but a step in the good direction. Keep up the good work!
Design Studio can be used to build BI applications. To make sure that the applications have a consistent look and feel within an enterprise, it is necessary to work with templates. Also, since Design Studio is still being developed, a template helps incorporating new functionality in a consistent manner. And finally, a template speeds up the process of building new reports, since basic functionality is already in place and it is not necessary to rebuild this every time.
The benefit of course depends of the similarity of the reports. If the reports are all very different, the benefit will be less. Bearing that in mind, it can help to work with general principles in the design of the reports.
Consistent look
To achieve a consistent look, it is necessary to build a css file that is used in the template. The css file, in combination with the theme, makes sure that all the components, i.e. tables, buttons, and so on, have a similar look and feel. Also, certain icons should be developed that will be part of the template.
The report area
A typical set up of the report area of a template consists of three elements, a header, a filter panel and a body.
Header: In the header area icons are placed that call up functions. Functions can be: open/close a filter panel, switch pages in the report, export to excel, print, help, etc. Usually the functions in the header are similar for all the reports. Sometimes a logo is part of the header area.
Filter panel: in every report there will always be a certain filter panel where it is possible set filters, i.e. a different year or level of the organization. Also in the panel navigational properties can be placed, or other properties that influence the result area.
Body: The body is the place where the result is shown. This area depends completely on the type of report that is build, and in general this can differ a lot.
Scripting
Depending on how sophisticated your reports will be, you will require scripting to make it all work. The scripting can be divided into two parts. One part that handles template functionality, and another part that is typically for a single report. The template scripting should be left alone by the persons who work with the template. This is scripting that handles i.e. functions that are triggered from the icons in the header. The report scripting is an area where the report builder can add his own code. Typically the data handling needs this kind of scripting. To organize the scripting, it is best to work with ‘buttons’ and call them with ‘onClick’ statements. The scripting can then be easily found and changed when necessary. Currently it is not possible to work with a library of scripting functionality throughout the whole application. Thus a change in the code needs te be copied to every report.
New functionality
Since new functionalities is expected every new release of Design Studio, it is important that these new functionalities can easily be incorporated into the template. Version management is thus important to start with. Every time a correction or improvement is made, this is logged in the template and documented. With a proper set up of the coding, it should be a matter of replacing coding for reports that are already build.
In conclusion: to build an enterprise BI application with Design Studio, a template can be used to speed up the development and maintain consistency between the several reports.
