By Davin Wilfrid, insiderRESEARCH
I had some spare time last week while the other cool kids were at SBOUC, so I decided to do a little off-the-cuff text analysis project.
The image below is a word cloud generated from every scrap of text from every presentation at SAP TechEd 2011 in Las Vegas last month. I scrubbed all obvious ("SAP") and irrelevant ("copyright," "the") words to leave us with the meat of all 370 or so presentations.
Click the image below to see the full-size verison:
What does this mean?
Word clouds are pretty rudimentary text analysis tools, but a few things do jump out at me:
1. HANA and Mobile/mobility make the list, but lag behind BusinessObjects and NetWeaver. The concepts are not mutually exclusive, but it seems clear the instructional content at TechEd is still heavily focused on solutions already in use. I suspect an analysis of SAP's marketing collateral would tell a different story.
2. User experience-focused terms like "UI," "user," and "design" are still sadly small. Here's hop
ing the rise of mobile applications increases the educational focus on these sorely needed areas.
Any other thoughts?
About this visualization:
Total words included in analysis: 737,240
Words displayed: 500
Top 10 Words by count: Data 7098 | Business 3939 | System 3383 | Management 3141 | Application 2945 | BusinessObjects 2885 |NetWeaver 2651 | Solution 2497 | Web 2251 | Manager 1988
Tools used: Text extracted from PDFs using batch function in PDF2TextPilot. Full text compiled and edited in gVim. Word cloud generated using Wordle.