Switched On: A Bowdark Podcast

Intelligent Business Intelligence with Hau Ngo

Episode Summary

James and I spoke with Hau Ngo, a business intelligence whiz. Hau founded and runs Summerlin Analytics, which consults and advises on business intelligence especially focused on SAP Analytics Cloud, S/4HANA, and SAP Business Warehouse. Summerlin does slick, informative write-ups of their ideas, and they're especially adept at finding cost savings in and through analytics.

Episode Notes

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.