Thanks Giving Dinner with Mango Yogurt Pachadi, Shallots Sambar and Plantain Poriyal

This year, I have a lot to be thankful for. We celebrated family dinner with shallots sambar, plantain poriyal and mango yogurt pachadi. Dishes were served with basmati rice. All three dishes are quintessentially South Indian. I cooked all the dishes and made sure no corners were cut. It turned out to be a nice dinner.

Image courtesy blendwithspices.com

I believe that successful cooking has a lot in common with successful project execution. I have been cooking for over 25 years now and learned that when I followed certain steps, the dishes turned out to be a success. These are the steps.

1. Always follow the recipe of an accomplished chef or cook diligently. Don't improvise on that recipe. Just because you are a good product manager does not mean you know anything about cooking.

2. Plan your dishes when you shop. Not after you enter the kitchen.

3. Do not compromise on the ingredients. Grow them in your back yard if you have to. I do this. I grow curry leaves and lemons in my back yard for cooking and pickling.

4. Don't experiment when you are cooking for others.

5. Focus on a few dishes you are good at and perfect them. It is better to be very good at a few things than to be mediocre at many things.

If you are interested in South Indian cooking you must have the cook book by S. Meenaksi Ammal. Her book is considered the bible of South Indian cooking. I also like the cook book by Chandra Padmanabhan. The dishes I cooked today were all based on her recipes. I have owned both books for several years.

You might be wondering if there is a restaurant in your area where you can sample these dishes. Try the Saravan Bhavan chain of restaurants. They have restaurants around the world in many countries. They may not be the most authentic. But they are close enough.

Visualizing Integration Add-On Downloads In Google Chart Using R

Yesterday i wrote about analyzing the SAP SuccessFactors Talent Hybrid integration Add-On download data. Today I mapped that data in Google Charts using the R package googleVis. This is how the data is visualized. The darker the region the more the downloads. I have embedded the interactive chart here. Move your cursor over the country to see the number of times the Talent Hybrid Add-on has been downloaded in that country.

Now let us see how this is done in R.

Step 1 is to import the data file into R

countrycount <- read.csv("country.csv")
The file country.csv has two columns. The first one is country names and the second one is number of downloads.

Step 2 is to set meaningful column names of the data frame.

names(countrycount)<- c("Country", "Downloads")

Step 3 is to tell the mapping package how to map  the data.

Geo=gvisGeoMap(countrycount, locationvar="Country", numvar="Downloads",options=list(height=350, dataMode='regions'))

Step 4 is to plot the map.

plot(Geo)

Once you do this R will open a browser window and show you the interactive map.

Analyzing SAP SuccessFactors Integration Add-On Downloads Using R

I am currently doing a course on getting and cleaning data. R programming language is the tool I use to clean data. I decided to look at the SAP SuccessFactors Add-On downloads data just for fun. These are the steps involved. You could do the same with Excel, But R lets you handle large volumes of data and perform actions that are not very easily possible with Excel. This is a simple exercise. But it demonstrates the logical process any data scientist or analyst would follow.

The Question for which I need an answer
The most important thing in data analysis is the question you want answered. In my case, I want to see which countries have the most interest in the SAP SuccessFactors Add-On. I suspect US and Germany will be at the top. But I have no idea which other countries show the most interest. Let us find out.

These are the steps and the R code to perform functions

Step 1: Read the data file which is available to me as a CSV file.

downloads <- read.csv("downloads.csv")
This reads the raw data I got from the data base into a data frame called downloads.

Step 2: Select just the data I need. 
The new dataframe downloads will have multiple rows with the same country names. I want to find out how many times each country name is listed. I can use the table function to find that out.

countrycount <- as.data.frame(table(downloads$Country.Name))

The above code creates a dataframe with the name of countries in one column and the number of times they occur in the original table in a second column names Freq,

Step 3: I then want to sort the data with the country with the most downloads on the top.
This is the R code to do that.

sort(countrycount$Freq, decreasing = TRUE)

Step 4 : The last step is to write the data to a CSV file so that I can share the data with other people and systems. This is the code for that.

write.csv(countrycount, "countrycount.csv")

Now let us look at the data.

Customers from the US downloaded the Add-On the most. No surprise there. We have thousands of SAP ERP HCM customers in the US. The second is Germany. No surprise there either. Third is Australia. Fourth is Saudi Arabia. That is good to know. There is a lot of interest in Australia and Saudi Arabia. There is a lot of interest from many European customers for the Talent Hybrid model. This information gives me and my product management colleagues enough insight to make some data driven decisions. Of course I have a lot more data than this and can find answers to many more such questions.

The next step could be to visualize this data to convey the information quickly. Many tools including R can do that. I will get to it in the future.

United States	3056
Germany	1046
Australia	867
Saudi Arabia	747
India	674
United Kingdom	519
Canada	474
Switzerland	434
Denmark	413
Brazil	393
Belgium	374
Spain	300
Chile	239
Netherlands	212
Mexico	168
China	139
Peru	132
South Africa	132
Hong Kong	114
Turkey	113
Austria	99
Argentina	93
Finland	92
Norway	86
Russian Feder.	70
Singapore	70
France	68
Colombia	63
Italy	58
South Korea	55
Dominican Rep.	37
Sweden	35
United Arab Em.	32
Qatar	31
Cyprus	28
Andorra	24
Ireland	24
Egypt	23
Poland	23
Liechtenstein	22
Nigeria	22
Portugal	21
Panama	18
Japan	16
Venezuela	16
Bangladesh	14
Israel	14
Vietnam	14
Zimbabwe	14
Trinidad,Tobago	13
Cambodia	12
Hungary	12
Iceland	12
Thailand	11
Jamaica	10
New Zealand	10
Czech Republic	9
Malaysia	8
Canary Islands	6
Ecuador	5
Kazakhstan	5
Indonesia	4
Philippines	4
Luxembourg	2
New Caledonia	1
Slovenia	1

Retraining Your Brain To Thinking In Unusual Ways

I am listening to the book "Think Like A Freak" by the authors of the book Freakanomics.

The book talks about data driven ways of looking at everyday decisions. For example, kicking a penalty shot straight at the goal keeper has a higher percentage of success compared to kicking towards the corners of the goal post.

They also encourage you to think like a child and try to do think small while solving big problems instead of thinking big. Here is a video of the authors talking about their book.

November 2014 Talent Hybrid Packaged Integrations Update

I made an update to the current and planned integrations between SAP and SuccessFactors Talent Solutions. This is for the Talent Hybrid Deployment model. The overview presentation is now available in internal and partner Jam groups.

I will write a more detailed blog post on SCN in a few days.