By Molly Folan
The 2nd installment of the HANA teaser series is from the session “Is your organization ready for SAP HANA? A guide to the new skills and approaches your IT and business organizations will require,” which will be presented by Hettie Tabor from Accenture at the @SAPinsider #HANAseminar, kicking off in Chicago July 25-27, 2012.
In-memory is a new concept in the business warehouse industry. Traditional data warehouse concepts don’t always fit in this new appliance; however, there are certain skills that can translate to this new environment — for example, resources proficient in most of the standard reporting tools can be transitioned over to the HANA toolset.
The grid below provides guidelines to perform a skills gap analysis to determine where your IT organization’s abilities need to be augmented. This is only the beginning of a long list of skills and approaches (offered in the session) to help prepare your IT and business organizations for big data and real-time analytics, but very helpful nonetheless.
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Role
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Traditional DB Skill
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SAP HANA
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Re-Tool
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Project Manager
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Focus was on Big Enterprise Data Warehouses
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New focus is on shorter implementations; agile development
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Train Project Managers
on Agile program management and smaller scope projects |
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Business Analysts
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Empowered Business leaders — Focus was primarily on defining business requirements and user acceptance testing
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New focus on having business resources become more self sufficient — Developing their own queries and reports
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Train business users “on the job” to use more self-service oriented analytic tools such as SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence (WebI) and SAP BusinessObjects Analysis.
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Interface Architects
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Focus was on “near real time” data using BW standard extractors for SAP data or ETL tools for non SAP data (pull not push)
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Focus is on real-time data from SAP using Sybase replication or SLT replication; still using ETL tools (SAP BusinessObjects Data Services) for non-SAP data
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Train interface architects on the art of real-time data and merging real -time and near real-time data; train architects on the use of SLT and Sybase replication
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Data Warehouse Architects
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Focus was on multiple layers of data — Heavy calculations and transformations, layers of data stores, InfoCubes (data marts), aggregates with duplicate data at each layer
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Focus is on more detailed data with minimal layers held in memory, accessed with views instead of stored data — Calculations are done on the fly
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Train database architects on in-memory modeling techniques and simplification
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Reporting Developers
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Focus on front end reporting tools; the report developers developed most of the reports for users
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Transition reporting to Business Analysts and Power Users — More focus on Web- based and mobile analytics
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Train business people to develop more self-service reporting; more focus on Web based tools and mobility
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Technical Architect
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Focus was on hardware and software installation, database storage techniques, and performance tuning
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Hardware and software installation done by the HW vendor; new in-memory technology
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Re-training DBA to become comfortable in an in-memory environment
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