Has the economic downturn resulted in your business reducing capital investments, cutting back on projects, or possibly postponing the latest SAP module installation or upgrade? Has your BW team has become smaller along with departmental or company-level staff reductions? Is your industry or business having difficulty maintaining profit margins going forward? 

If you answer yes to any of these questions, you have a right to be concerned about the mission of your BW team and your own career path. There are several ways you can react once the reality of the business climate sinks in. One way is to look for opportunities elsewhere. Another is to duck for cover and just do your job in a minimalist way that doesn’t bring additional attention to your team, while hoping your fortune will change as the business does.

However, the best approach is to proactively reach out, get smarter, and take charge of yourself and your team. As you will see, there are several very low- (or no-) cost ways to increase your team’s technical capabilities while simultaneously boosting team moral and motivation. I will provide some real examples and discuss the issues associated with the action, including any costs. By using this approach, you may very well change your fortunes by adding value to yourself, your team, and your business.

Table 1 provides an overview of some of the activities your BI team could consider, including the issues each activity addresses and what the cost is. I’ll discuss each of these activities in detail in the next sections.

On-the-Job Training

This may be the easiest way to get smarter and fill any technical or leadership gaps. Take a close look at the roles and responsibilities within your team and shake them up by shifting tasks that normally go to one person to a different person on the team. If someone hasn’t developed at the InfoObject or DataStore object (DSO) level for a while (or ever), then assign him to that area. For the person now assigned to this new area to succeed, this person should be also be assigned a mentor, someone experienced in this area who can provide direction and hands-on help if needed.  

If others have been focused on development, then put them in charge of leading a business analysis effort. An example of this would be to take a developer supporting a part of the business, in this case the accounting department, and ask him to carry out the requirements analysis needed to justify the creation of more accounting key performance indicators in SAP NetWeaver BW. When finished, the developer has newly exercised business analysis skills making him a more valuable BW team member.

Cross training in this way should be routine because it leads to well-rounded BW team members. However, managers and developers alike often get stuck in old ways and stay in our comfort zones. For example, I’ve assigned myself development areas that I haven’t touched in two years. I am building the InfoObjects, DSOs, and InfoCubes for a new external data source. Once finished, my team and I will have moved the reporting of this data from the external system to SAP NetWeaver BW. This will help relieve the server performance problems on the external system and tune up this BW manager on SAP NetWeaver BW development skills. This has been an enriching experience and a good reminder of the many technical development steps it takes to build new interfaces, DSOs, and InfoCubes.

Issues with resistance to change can arise, but in today’s economic environment they don’t hold much weight. Explaining the many benefits of cross training is usually all it takes to overcome any nervousness about the effort. As businesses do more with fewer resources, IT professionals are expected to cross-train both as a low-cost way to enlarge an individual’s skill set and to protect the company from key people leaving who have no backup support.

Widen the Scope of Your Team

There may have been external systems to SAP that were out of project scope when the BW team was focused on a specific go-live date. Now that the project is over and you are operationally settled in, take another look and see if you can integrate that external system into SAP NetWeaver BW. At my company, my team and I were approached about bringing in workflow data used to produce advertisements because the server it was running on had a hard time crunching the large amounts of data produced for reports, without affecting server performance.

This should be a no-cost option, except for possible disc space and team development time. This project could also reduce costs because the external system may have its own reporting support or tools that can be reduced or discontinued once integrated into the SAP NetWeaver BW system. For example, my company was using a customized Java/HTML environment that required programmer support. This support can be redirected to other business priorities once we finish moving this data into SAP NetWeaver BW.

Issues with resource allocations and movement of data to new technology platforms could crop up when discussing the integration option. Typically, the discussions are among the BW IT team, the IT team currently supporting the external solution for BI reporting, and the business department whose data is affected. Departments not familiar with SAP NetWeaver BW tools usually need some exposure through demonstrations of the current SAP NetWeaver BW production system to become comfortable with the idea of consolidating on the SAP NetWeaver BW platform.

Replace Intensive Spreadsheet Work

Some departments spend a considerable amount of time each week or monthly collating data in spreadsheets to produce standard reports. Investigate these processes to see if SAP NetWeaver BW can remove the burden from that department. This may mean loading raw data from a spreadsheet to get started, but then further calculation and merging steps that usually were carried out in Excel could be carried out easily in SAP NetWeaver BW.

For example, a key statistic used to monitor sales and collection rates was being calculated via spreadsheets, but my team determined that the process could move entirely to SAP NetWeaver BW. We proved this by tracing back to the origin of the spreadsheets’ raw data to the SAP system and documented the manual steps the business took to calculate the statistics. Not all this raw data was being extracted into SAP NetWeaver BW, but we added new fields to existing extractors and created new generic extractors to pull all the additional data we needed.

Costs are disc space and time, with time potentially being an issue here. This is due to the nature of the spreadsheet work. In extremely intensive spreadsheet data crunching, with dozens of linked worksheets and dependent cell calculations, it could take a significant number of hours to document what is happening.

Note
A word of caution: If the spreadsheet merges data from several systems, it could cause what appears to be a small project to turn into something much larger. It is imperative that the origins of all the data in the spreadsheet be proven as the first step. If you find multiple data sources being merged into one large spreadsheet, then the project to move this into SAP NetWeaver BW may not be feasible.

Integrate Island Systems

Look around to see if there is an important application that is an island (no interfaces to other systems) and make a case for integration into SAP NetWeaver BW. At my company, my team and I found a key application that tracked marketing initiatives that had no connections to other systems. When this application is integrated into SAP NetWeaver BW, we will be able to report on goals (as specified in the marketing initiative database) as well as actual revenue for these key new products.

This project carries no cost, except possibly disc space and time. Be aware that issues could crop up with the sensitive nature of the application in question. In some cases, more visibility is not desired because the data might be directly linked to sales incentive payments or other salary-related areas. SAP NetWeaver BW security demonstrations to the concerned parties should dampen fears about needless or accidental overexposure of sensitive data.

Keep Up with SAP Technology Changes

Even if the upgrade you were expecting is delayed, or the next module is not going to be installed as scheduled, you can still take part in SAP webinars and other low-cost exposure events to stay up-to-date on the latest technology from SAP. Table 2 shows three webinars and two half-day, in-person technology discussions that we have recently taken part in. These events help to fill in gaps in our knowledge about some of the latest BI offerings from SAP.

SAP Service Marketplace is full of white papers, wiki, forums, and blogs about every SAP technology. Here are two data warehousing topics from SAP Service Marketplace that we have read.

• Basics on data warehousing at SAP BusinessObjects community site: Go to Myhome > Business Objects > Home > Star Schema Design. This wiki provides a huge amount of background information on the reasons for data warehousing, what the variations are, and why it relates to star schema designs.
• SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator at the SAP Developer Network: Go to Home > SAP NetWeaver Capabilities > Information Management > Business Intelligence. Here you have access to around a dozen articles on various topics related to SAP NetWeaver BW accelerator. The article written by independent consulting firm Wintercorp is a must read as is the Frequently Asked Questions document for SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator for SAP NetWeaver BW 7.0.

If you have an SAP system, you are already licensed to use SAP Service Marketplace, so it is just your time that is needed. Management could be concerned with your focus if you spend too much time on this Web site, so limit it to a few hours a week. Current work priorities should always take precedence over investigating the next wave of technology offerings (unless that is the agreed-upon priority).

Formal and Informal Training

Push to attend training even in areas that are not yet on the table to be installed, but could be in the pipeline in the coming years. We are studying SAP BusinessObjects and SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, even though both are just in the discussion phase.

If you can’t squeeze out money to attend Sapphire or other weeklong events, purchase books from SAP PRESS or other vetted sources. Table 3 lists books from SAP PRESS that we have purchased along with my assessment of the contents.

In addition, Insider Multimedia Training offers training lessons and courses on dozens of topics — including BW Reporting and SAP BusinessObjects — on CDs and on-demand. You can read more about this training option at https://www.insidermultimediatraining.com/.

Issues with lack of training dollars can come up, but costs are minimal for one of the many great SAP PRESS books. If books aren’t typically funded through your place of work, just purchase them yourself. After all, it is your career you’re taking care of. Formal training can cost significantly more than a few books, so funding that yourself may be out of the question. Senior management may need to be shown how a certain class or seminar can lead to direct productivity payoffs when you return. Presenting training in business terms, with real tangible benefits once you return, helps you get the approval you need.

Branch Out  into Other Software

This alternative is less likely for some, but look for opportunities with other software packages that are relevant to data warehousing. This could provide an opportunity to expand the team’s technical skills and help the company move forward with the new initiative. Find a project in other parts of the company for which you can volunteer your services.

For example, I was informed by senior management of a project that is focused on Web site traffic analysis. We volunteered the time of a key member of the BW team not only to gain exposure to the new application, but also to provide development or consulting help if that was needed. The project finished successfully with the BW team gaining crucial exposure to new technology while in the process developing collaborative relationships we can build upon in the future. The idea from the start was to introduce ourselves, not take anything over, to help if need be but only if asked. 

A corollary to this is to position yourselves as a data warehouse team and not exclusively a narrower SAP NetWeaver BW team. We all worked hard to learn SAP systems, but it doesn’t mean other tools can’t help you add value to the business. If your position is only SAP-or-the-highway, then you may find yourself on the highway. Cost is hard to pin down, but if the software is already purchased then it is just your time. Jurisdictional issues could come up with organizational assignments or other departments may not need any additional resources. Senior management typically sorts out any jurisdictional issues. 

Search Online for BW Job Descriptions

There is great value in keeping up with the marketplace for your BW skills. Search for similar jobs online and inspect the descriptions. Craigslist.org, Monster.com, and WashingtonPost.com are all good places to start. Do you have all the technical abilities required for them? If you spot an area in which you could improve, volunteer to take over that area on your team, even if temporarily to gain the experience. Make sure that you are prepared for a rough landing should your place of business decline by being fluent in as many BW technical areas as possible. No cost issues here, but maybe job searching, even just to read the descriptions, should be done from home.

Brian Hether

Brian Hether is the manager of data warehousing at The Washington Post. He has 17 years of data warehousing experience, most recently with SAP NetWeaver BW, helping take the system live in 2007. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, a master’s degree in information systems, and a professional development certification in business administration from Georgetown University.

You may contact the author at hetherbk@yahoo.com.

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