BI Group managing partner Alexandra Carvalho broke new ground when she was appointed as the first female SAP Mentor in the APAC region. She spoke to Freya Purnell about her SAP journey and what she sees as the next big things in BI.
Alexandra Carvalho might not look like the stereotypical geek – but she certainly has the credentials to earn the title. Having trained as an electrical engineer in computer science, she joined PwC’s graduate program, and received her entrée to the SAP world 15 years ago when she was sent to Philadelphia in the US to be trained in ABAP.
“At that point, if you knew any little thing about SAP, you knew more than anyone else because it was something quite new,” Carvalho says.
After two years slaving over the day-to-day code work involved in doing ABAP only, she became disenchanted with not being able to see the bigger picture, and was inspired instead to move into business intelligence (BI).
“I couldn’t understand the context in terms of the value added, and I wanted to see more of the business and how I could actually deliver something where I could see the results,” she says.
Fortunately, an opportunity arose to complete BW training, and she was off – with her very first project doing a SAP BW implementation for CRM in an electricity company.
It was the start of more than a decade in the BI space, playing various roles from developer to lead project manager, solution architect and data manager. Carvalho’s experience stretches across BW, CRM and SRM particularly in the logistics, utilities and mining industries. Now managing partner of management consultancy BI Group, where she has worked since 2006, Carvalho has also been very active in the SAP community both in Australia and further afield through the SAP Community Network.
In 2012, she became the first female SAP Mentor from the Asia Pacific region – an achievement she was “over the moon” about.
It was particularly pleasing for Carvalho given her commitment to helping other women find their feet in the SAP community in Australia. She says women who are SAP consultants and have moved to Australia from overseas, perhaps with a partner, can find it difficult to land their first job, so she uses her own network to help them establish themselves.
“It was important not only because I was an SAP Mentor, but because I could actually represent women in our region. They can see another woman who knows SAP, is a very technical person, knows the technology and they can actually relate to me. Because there is always this misconception that women are not technical,” she says.
Even with the skills and experience at their disposal, Carvalho believes women still have to fight to move through the ranks of the SAP community, which is still very male-dominated.
“I’m very technical and got into the business side of things, but when people first look at you, they don’t expect a woman to be a geek, as we’re called. There is an expectation that a geek is a man, and I don’t tick those boxes,” she says.
“What I say to any woman I come cross is it is hard, but it’s not impossible. If you really want it and set your mind to it, you will get it, but you do need to have that extra level of training and determination.”
Disruptive innovation in BI
In the business intelligence space, the most significant shifts Carvalho has observed in recent years is the availability of tools such as HANA to tackle the challenges of big data, which has truly changed how data can be analysed quickly, accurately and in new ways.
Having worked with a Melbourne-based electricity company on a big data project, she points to utilities as an industry which is being transformed by the ability to better analyse electricity consumption so they can negotiate better rates when buying from distributors.
“Having HANA and being able to analyse big data was a massive change, and they managed to get millions and millions of dollars in just knowing the right consumption and how much they needed to buy from their suppliers,” she says.
‘Pervasive BI’ is another major change, in terms of how end users actually access BI.
“This is democratising business intelligence. The fact that we now have DIY tools like Visual Intelligence, where SAP is promoting heavily the capacity of users to interact and do their own reporting, means that they can see things they couldn’t see before, and become more effective at work. So it’s a combination of DIY analytics, mobility and big data in HANA, that if you put them together, it’s really powerful.”
Still a bumpy road
Despite these advances and the opportunities they present, Carvalho still sees customers struggling to embrace SAP BW.
“Even though obviously CIOs really want to get their heads around what’s happening in the organisation, when they see the roadmap of the BI project in terms of cost and implementation, there is the fact that it is a heavily technical solution, and that’s the biggest drawback in terms of having more clients adopting business intelligence, especially BW,” she says.
The integration of BusinessObjects has provided more entry points for clients into BI, that don’t necessarily require the big-bang BW approach.
“You can actually use Data Services and integrate BOBJ for non-SAP clients like small to medium enterprises or other clients that are not interested in going down the track of a BW implementation,” Carvalho says.
And while the integration of SAP and BusinessObjects has improved, with some fine-tuning of the relationship, with so many tools in the portfolio, it is still very confusing for clients.
“My take is that SAP will, in the near future, probably consolidate the tools based on their functionality, and improve the interface so it’s much better,” she says. “Knowing BW is a very small percentage of the analytics market, SAP is trying to actually bet on those [organisations] that are non-SAP, and they are not big enterprises. Now they are looking at bringing the ones that are not prepared to invest in large-scale SAP implementations but they can still invest in SAP BOBJ for reporting.”
Especially with the emergence of HANA, there is much talk about what the future is for SAP BW – but Carvalho believes there will a natural evolution of the product.
“BW is going to be the enterprise data warehouse where you bring all the data together from the various SAP systems as well as the non-SAP legacy systems, but we may have HANA as being the SAP BI system running in-memory. So I expect BW to be there in the future, and the technology underlying to change toe be in-memory.”
Looking forward to continuing her role in the SAP community, now as an SAP Mentor, Carvalho’s advice to other women seeking to carve out a career in SAP is perhaps not surprising – to find a mentor.
“You are responsible for your own results. I attach myself to people I respect, and I am always getting their feedback and listening to them, to find ways of improving. Find someone you trust and keep putting one step in front of the other – just move forward and don’t stop because someone’s telling you it’s not for you.”
This article was originally published in Inside SAP Autumn 2013.
