Intelligent Business Intelligence with Hau Ngo

07/07/21 • 44 min

Switched On: A Bowdark Podcast

Highlights

Hau’s been doing it 20 years!
Fell into analytics accidentally — got into the working world via an on-campus interview with PwC. Wound up getting business consulting training, without really expecting it. First project was in US Navy, doing purchase order stuff with pre-printed forms.
Being onsite is a consulting holdover that’s really shifted in COVID times
Hau is seeing more analysts with a technical background, seeing more developers with business acumen
Analytics project team size is starting to get smaller, each person can do more
With SAP analytics cloud, SAP’s approach is that the customer retains ownership and control of the data
Analytics Cloud is the easy part: you still have to tackle your data
Infrastructure connection pain points remain part of the challenge of any project. Overcome that hurdle quickly and you’ll be rolling

Money Quotes

Hau

Today, I am solving the same problems from 20 years ago — but I get to solve faster, and with cooler tools.

The struggle has always been: “How do i know what i have?”

You don’t even need to have my coding/engineering background!

[on SAP Analytics Cloud performance] It’s just as fast — or just as slow [as your source system].

How do I get this business person to see this insight really quickly?

Paul

You can’t have a bad source system and have an analytics tool make up for that.

It’s still boring, but it’s boring in the cloud! So it’s better!

James

We’re trending in a direction where it’s becoming more democratized. The tooling is making it more accessible.

We’ve seen a shift: let’s not even do traditional BI because of all the headaches.

Highlights

Hau’s been doing it 20 years!
Fell into analytics accidentally — got into the working world via an on-campus interview with PwC. Wound up getting business consulting training, without really expecting it. First project was in US Navy, doing purchase order stuff with pre-printed forms.
Being onsite is a consulting holdover that’s really shifted in COVID times
Hau is seeing more analysts with a technical background, seeing more developers with business acumen
Analytics project team size is starting to get smaller, each person can do more
With SAP analytics cloud, SAP’s approach is that the customer retains ownership and control of the data
Analytics Cloud is the easy part: you still have to tackle your data
Infrastructure connection pain points remain part of the challenge of any project. Overcome that hurdle quickly and you’ll be rolling

Money Quotes

Hau

Today, I am solving the same problems from 20 years ago — but I get to solve faster, and with cooler tools.

The struggle has always been: “How do i know what i have?”

You don’t even need to have my coding/engineering background!

[on SAP Analytics Cloud performance] It’s just as fast — or just as slow [as your source system].

How do I get this business person to see this insight really quickly?

Paul

You can’t have a bad source system and have an analytics tool make up for that.

It’s still boring, but it’s boring in the cloud! So it’s better!

James

We’re trending in a direction where it’s becoming more democratized. The tooling is making it more accessible.

We’ve seen a shift: let’s not even do traditional BI because of all the headaches.

Previous Episode

Progressive Web Apps with Carmen Bourlon

James and I spoke with Carmen Bourlon, a virtuoso developer that just so happens to work with us at Bowdark. Carmen created margiemap.com, which visually illustrates the relationship between income levels and library access. She also wrote Let’s Take This Offline, a book introducing developers to the concepts of service workers and progressive web apps. Buy it!

Highlights

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are less of a technology and more of an idea. A web app should be fast, work offline, and be native-like...and now browsers include technologies that enable that. Foremost among these technologies are the service worker and, to a lesser extent, the manifest file which gives the web app a native-like experience on devices.
Android is especially good in this play. iOS doesn’t have all the same features as Android at this moment, but the important ones are there. You can have a home screen icon, and have service workers (since 2018-ish).
This has great applicability to utilities companies. They are out in random spots all the time — so often without network, even without a cellular data connection. How do I get the information back to HQ? Traditional web app would demand your full connectivity before doing ANYTHING.
The beauty of this middleware is that there’s no cost. It’s just a JavaScript file.
There are tons of cases out there where an existing app can be converted without a full rewrite.
Carmen would love to see the world move closer to peer-to-peer mesh networks for connectivity purposes.

Money Quotes

Carmen

PWA is less of a technology and more of an idea.

It should be mobile-friendly, and it should look as much like a native app as possible.

When you think about it, as a user you just want to press the button and move on with your day.

If you can write Fiori, you can write this.

Paul

Your web page or Fiori app doesn’t even have to know it’s offline.

Next Episode

The Evolution of Ops in SAP

Highlights

SAP for 20 years, started out in Basis administration
Worked at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, on how to deploy SAP in AWS (so cool)
Became a devops lover — but ecosystem wasn’t ready. Jumped into big data instead at Mindtree, then worked with Hadoop, Vora
Operations are 3 buckets: build, run, change
System administrators have been somewhat underserved by UI/UX revolutions in SAP. There are hundreds of “Manage [X] Orders” Fiori apps, but no Basis apps.
Disk space and start/stop are low-hanging fruit in the administrative automation space

If you follow Chris on Twitter, you’ll quickly find about a hundred pics of him grinning at the camera for a selfie.

The most mistakes happen in ops in: teams don’t have a good handle on what they’re supposed to actually do. Their purview. (If it’s not functional or code, it’s Basis).
Currently playing with Kubernetes as development system units of build
What should the future look like? “There isn’t one ring to rule them all.” There should be an API/set of web services that programmatically control SAP systems at the system level. From there, you can create and extend whatever you choose — then RunDeck can be used to configure a system. Prometheus can pull directly from the system.