We used to hear BI reports requests coming from everywhere, then we start to notice everyone suddenly is talking about Dashboards and now we call it 'Visual Storytelling'. I am a BI developer all my career. On the presentation layer I'd worked on Crystal Reports all the way to Bex report, WAD,Webi, Xcelsius, Explorer etc. I also had the opportunity to work with non-SAP tool like Actuate and to some extend macro on excel.
In most cases, operational reports can be developed in Abap reports residing in ECC except those with complex mappings. For management reports, we need highly aggregated data and that's where dashboards come into place. It seems over the years, dashboards without the flow of guided data interpretation,self-service capability and mobility are not really effective to provide informed decision making data on the go. Hence you see that Visual Analytics tool such as Tableau, Lumira and Qlikview are fast becoming an interest in big organization. The functions of a BI developer is more challenging and interesting as we need to use our technical expertise combine with our functional knowledge and interaction with business together with some creativity in visual representation of data to derive business visual story from the dashboard.
Among the tools for Visual Analytic I am working on is Tableau and Lumira. It seems Tableau is more mature in the Visual Analytic space and Lumira is actually SAP BO Visualizer that is wrap under HANA licence and it integrates directly with HANA model. Tableau by far fetch sits at the highest position in Gartner Magic Quadrant.But I always believe the position in Gartner Magic Quadrant does not mean anything concrete for the reason that product is selected as an organization groupwide BI tool. We must choose the right technology based on the integration of business processes and technology platforms because at the end ,accuracy and single source of truth speak the loudest in the Analytics space; not the impressive animation on the dashboard.So it is time for us to really test out the pros and cons of each technology. Having to say that, we need to bear in mind that the ultimate winning point should be the ability to tell a good business story accurately and not the name of the product or where it sits at the Magic Quadrant.
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