May 13, 2008
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Come gather round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
Five years from now the SAP user community will look back and recognize the year 2008 as a breakthrough year in the truest sense of the word. A breakthrough in that, after years of broken promises and dashed expectations, SAP finally recognized that, try as they may, they really didn't possess the internal know-how and resources to deliver a top-notch reporting system for the average Joe (or Josephine). After giving it all they had, at the end of the day they arrived at a moment of epiphany where it all suddenly became crystal clear (sorry, I couldn't resist).
When I had a chance to preview the "Crystal killer" application, the ill-fated Report Designer component of NetWeaver 2004s, at the Sapphire conference in Orlando, FL in the spring of 2006, I came away with the sneaky suspicion that "something is rotten in Denmark". I spent three straight days in the SAP BI booth looking under the hood of the new formatted reporting solution and it didn't take long to figure out that they had a long way to go to match the rich feature set in the industry leading reporting tool, Crystal Reports. I suppose SAP found out the hard way that the folks in charge of Crystal Reports haven't exactly been sitting around doing nothing over the past fifteen years or so.
After having worked closely with Crystal Reports over the past ten years and with integrating Crystal with SAP BW/BI for about six of those years, I've come to realize that Crystal Reports is its own worst enemy. The package appears deceptively simple. And, compared to many tools out there on the market that attempt to do the same thing, I suppose it is fairly simple. But hidden underneath that supposed simplicity is a deep and technically complex reporting platform that, in the right hands, can get you out of a lot of information log jams.
I often call Crystal Reports the "Rodney Dangerfield" of the BI industry. As hard as it tries, "it just don't get no respect". At least until someone actually takes the time and makes the effort to get past the surface and really see what it can do. And it can do a lot. Or, more accurately, you can do a lot with it. I also call Crystal the "Swiss army knife" of BI tools. You can throw almost any BI requirement at it and it will typically handle it quite nicely, as long as you stay within its "sweet spot". And while there are definitely some specific requirements it can’t handle, you'll be hard pressed to find any other tool on the market that can cover more ground and get more done with less time than Crystal.
One thing I've noticed having been on dozens of reporting/data warehouse/business intelligence projects throughout the years is that Crystal Reports is typically not thought of very highly amongst the IT crowd. I even had one project manager (from the IT side of the house) tell me that he could "give a monkey a Crystal Reports manual and within a week he'd be crankin' out reports". I hear the monkey did remarkably well. At least for a monkey.
But as I've reflected further upon the project manager's comments, in many ways it's more of a compliment than a putdown (although I think, from his perspective, he meant it more as a putdown). It really says a lot about how approachable Crystal is as a technology. And this is what will make this a breakthrough year for so many SAP end users who have been put off for so long by technologies that, to put it bluntly, were not designed to be used by "normal" people.
Up until now, the SAP end user community has grown accustomed to getting information "the hard way". I am truly amazed at how resourceful business end users have become from years and years of having to come up with some way, any way, to get the information they so desperately need to run their business. And (in spite of the comment about the monkey) I also have a lot of respect for how much the IT side has been able to accomplish given the relatively crude set of "out of the box" tools they have been given. But, if I had to guess, beginning this year there's going to be a lot of people kicking themselves for having spent so much time and effort in the past doing what should have been a relatively simple task - getting information out of SAP BW.
After all, isn't that the whole premise of a warehouse in the first place? In theory (and it is a theory) a data warehouse should function as a sort of village watering hole – users bring their buckets and simply fill them up to their heart's content. No need to know all the underlying details, no big effort involved: simply come to the well, dip, and drink.
Well, about 15 or so years a later and after many, many buckets of money, pretty much everyone's figuring out that, as much as we'd like it to be otherwise, it just ain't that simple. The IT side of the house has discovered that even the very best designed and managed data warehouses are, in the end, still data. And end users have a hard time dealing with data.
This is why the introduction of a world-class reporting tool like Crystal Reports (and its cousins Web Intelligence, Voyager, and Crystal Xcelsius) is going change the SAP user's world more than perhaps any other innovation in the SAP BW space since the platform was first released. Because now, finally, the user community will have access to tools that they can actually get their hands around. Usable tools. Approachable tools.
This is also why the single biggest challenge for IT departments at SAP sites is going to be how to properly manage the upcoming change in how users go after their SAP BW data. The difficulty won't lie so much in the tools themselves (although it will take a while to master them) but rather in re-shaping user's expectations and providing incentives to modify deeply entrenched habits. HINT: "You can take my Excel spreadsheet away from me when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers". SAP end users have a certain way of looking at and dealing with getting to their SAP BW data. Moving to these new, advanced BI tools is going to require some necessary, but in the end, beneficial, changes of habit.
As you begin to head down this new, unexplored path, you might want to consider enlisting the help of someone who has been down the road ahead of you and has lived to tell about it. When Lewis and Clark set out to explore the unknown far western lands of North America, they enlisted the help of and Indian woman named Sacajawea (and her lesser know husband Charbonneau). Their guidance and knowledge of the land proved invaluable to the expedition and proved to be one of the leading factors in the ultimate success of the journey.
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.
Posted by Mike Garrett at 12:15 AM | Comments (0)
