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00:44:12Season 1 · Episode 4

Intelligent Business Intelligence with Hau Ngo

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.

Hau Ngo, Paul Modderman, James Wood

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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.