Disconnect Between Analytics and Business ProcessesCompanies have invested a lot in information technology to better improve business processes; these systems generate and store lots of data.However, when confronted with the need to make a decision, too few companies are able get the data they need, at the right time and in the right context, to make an informed decision.These decisions can range from a simple as which prospective customer do I call first? to who is my best supplier?to how should I raise capital to fund my next major acquisition?The promise of business intelligence has been here for more than 20 years, and Oracle has been with the evolution of the market. The traditional approach has been to separate systems that run the business from the systems that analyze and report on the business. From a database architecture perspective, the reasons for this go back to how data is stored in transaction processing (OLTP Systems) and how data is analyzed (OLAP/DW systems). Getting the right data to the right person, at the right time of the business process, securely, and so that it is relevant to the decision at hand is an extraordinarily complex problem, it requires knowledge of database, transaction processing, ETL, user security, data warehousing, metadata, middleware and user roles. There are many business process that require analytics to solve, oftentimes there are issues that pop up that are unexpected or unforeseen. These novel issues typically require a new ad-hoc analysis to address the issues. Building these analyses is time-intensive and often done outside of the traditional ERP or BI systems. Data is extracted into a spreadsheet, quickly analyzed, spreadsheets are emailed around and meetings are called to discuss. Optimizing across multiple scenarios to find the best decision is also difficult, since underlying situation can change rapidly, the data that is disconnected and is always out-of –date. In addition, working in a manual, spread-sheet process is time-intensive and the results are not delivered in time to influence the decision-making process. The spreadsheets require lots of work to build, and they are not repeatable or scalable. The data has to be extracted from source systems and is no longer secure. In addition, it is hard to ensure that there is follow-through and to compare the actual results with what was planned. Given this disconnect, it is very hard to start to learn from these decisions and improve on them in the future. Ultimately, how an organization makes decisions will drive how the organization is achieving its strategy. Does every employee know how the decisions they make link to the larger corporate strategy? Is the strategy aligned to the real world facts? What is being done to optimize and align employees to achieve the larger corporate strategy goals?
Too Easy to build silos of analytic data and too expensive to connect between the silos.We’ve also seen many customers who fall into the analytic silo problem. The reason is pretty straight-forward, it is easy to build silos of data but too hard to connect between the silos. On trend we’ve noticed is that as business analytic requirements change, it is easy to buy a single, “quick-fix” or point solution to answer the needs of that single application or departmental solution. However, having multiple BI tools is expensive. It is expensive to procure the tools, but bigger issue is the loss of productivity by both IT and the line of business. IT must develop, over-and-over again, database connections, user access, re-define business metrics and work to de-bug and harmonize across multiple BI tools. End-users cannot learn each different tool, leading to inability to build their own reports and unable to self-service, ultimately leading to more stress and backlog on the IT department. It is an impossible task to keep the multiple tools in sync. An old, brittle BI system can only deliver “After-the-fact” insight: Information reaches decision-makers when it’s too late to make a change. The organization is unable to spot emerging opportunities and risks in time to take advantage.A more insidious cost comes from the lack of alignment that flows from the inconsistent business measures. Departmental & systems stovepipes of information with multiple versions of truth prevent the “big picture” of business performance and it is difficult to share information consistently across the enterprise. Companies have data but lack the insight. Lots of data is being collected in operational systems, but the organization lacks insight into that data related to market, customer, and product trends that could help employees run the business more effectively. There is no big picture. Since these silos of data exist in marketing,finance, sales, manufacturing, and other departments, the organizationlacks a complete and consistent view of this information to assess overall business performance as well as cause and effect relationships. Departmental solutions promote optimization of each department but at the expense of overall corporate performance, what impact does my lowest-cost supplier have on my product quality, product re-work and customer satisfaction? Who are my customers? What have they bought? What can I cross-sell them? Some research firms have noted that if users carry out analysis based only on data that is immediately accessible to them (such as through a departmental BI effort), rather than leveraging an appropriately managed, integrated and consistently designed dataset, then their basis for decision making may be flawed.Finally, lacking a quality BI foundation, employees in the organization resort to exporting data into Excel, where they must combine, format, analyze, and create reports on the data, then cut and paste those reports for presentation to management, then repeat the process every time management wants an update. This process is time consuming, costly, error prone, subject to individual interpretation, inflexible, and limited to periodic intervals. Information is not timely, consistent, or reliable. This “Spreadsheet hell” – results in unmanageable multiple versions of the files, repeated manual data integration each time reports are needed, and a high risk of incorrect results due to calculations or missed data cleansing steps. We’ve also noticed a rise in shadow IT projects, typically around business intelligence and reporting leading to ongoing integration costs and rising support costs.
Reality of BI projects is that requirements always evolve – adaptive and flexible solutions are key to successOne of the most significant challenges IT faces in deploying BI is to respond to the changing nature of business analyticrequirements. Business is in a new state of constant fluidity: new acquisitions, divestitures, new partner, new sales channels, all combine to create more complexity.Given the continuous rate of change in the current economic environment, the demands of the business users put stress on IT’s ability to deliver timely and accurate information. As companies acquires or divests divisions, or comes under a new regulatory regime, or the emergence of a new competitor from half-way around the world, the result is that the business analytic requirements change rapidly.BI business requirements always shift to reflect reality of evolving business needs. Requirements change in many areas – the reports, the metrics, the hierarchies, the dimensions, the data refresh frequency, the method of access. You name it and business users are changing it. Successful BI projects always reflect the evolving company strategy and direction, thus the projects are always evolving.Gartner recently quantified this point at a 2011 conference stating that 50% of BI requirements change within the first twelve months. Traditional BI tools can’t keep up. In addition, new data sources that fall outside of the traditional applications, like social networking, text, recorded media, and machine logs. This means that the IT department must scramble to leverage the analytic capabilities of these assets. It is challenging to bring these new data sources into the corporation’s analytic infrastructure to fully leverage the insights contained in these new data stores. The challenge is to integrate, synthesize and correlate the new data sources with the rest of the company’s analytic infrastructure. BI has traditionally been a separate system, separated from the rest of the IT infrastructure, not linked with mission-critical ERP apps or sales or CRM application. Companies must maintain user accounts in multiple systems as well as maintain user roles and security in multiple systems. Reference: James Richardson, Gartner. “Does Agile BI Deliver Agility?” Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2011, January 31 – February 1, 2011, Park Plaza Westminster Bridge, London, UK
Oracle’s answer to these challenges is the new Oracle BI Foundation. The only BI platform on the market that is built to last and made for change.First Intelligent Business Process Improve Business Performance by linking insight to action Intelligent Decision Cycles enables you to improve business performance by linking insights with processes, simplifying scenario analysis and aligning scorecards to strategy,and ensure follow-throughLowest Cost of Ownership Reusable analytic assets improve productivity and provide consistent enterprise metrics Reusable Analytic Assets lower costs by improving user productivity and providing consistency of enterprise metricsand ensure confidence in consistent numbersStart Simple and Evolve Manage risk with single analytic framework across a range of schemas and deployment options Manage risk with analytic agility: Start Simple and evolve, knock down data silos, and drive standards-based integration with existing IT). The benefit is that Oracle BI Foundation delivers the lowest total cost of ownership for an organization. The Oracle BI Foundation is built to last and made for change; this means that customers can deploy the analytic functionality they need from a single BI tool set.
Oracle’s answer to these challenges is the new Oracle BI Foundation. The only BI platform on the market that is built to last and made for change.First Intelligent Business Process Improve Business Performance by linking insight to action Intelligent Decision Cycles enables you to improve business performance by linking insights with processes, simplifying scenario analysis and aligning scorecards to strategy,and ensure follow-throughLowest Cost of Ownership Reusable analytic assets improve productivity and provide consistent enterprise metrics Reusable Analytic Assets lower costs by improving user productivity and providing consistency of enterprise metricsand ensure confidence in consistent numbersStart Simple and Evolve Manage risk with single analytic framework across a range of schemas and deployment options Manage risk with analytic agility: Start Simple and evolve, knock down data silos, and drive standards-based integration with existing IT). The benefit is that Oracle BI Foundation delivers the lowest total cost of ownership for an organization. The Oracle BI Foundation is built to last and made for change; this means that customers can deploy the analytic functionality they need from a single BI tool set.
For many organizations, the challenge is to analyze data such that the effect of the analytics is as useful as it can be.More and more, organizations are moving away from the concept of “management reporting” to an environment where business intelligence plays and more central role and becomes more pervasive. As many analysts have commented, this quickly moves to a scenario where business intelligence moves into the context of the business process – not just to make users’ information experience more effective, but also to allow for business process optimization. Software Macro-Trends: Reshaping Enterprise Software - Sep 2005We’ve been discussing this for a number of years and are now able to deliver it. Took us time to build this functionality to integrate business intelligence with business processes. Seems simple on the surface, but actually very complex. The OBI Foundation project drew upon Oracle expertise with business intelligence technology, our experience with market-leading BI Applications, Oracle expertise with our current applications (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel CRM), our edge applications like Demantra and Primavera as well as the next-generation Fusion Applications. Pulling all of this together around open, industry-standards Fusion Middleware to manage user security, use role, data security and, most importantly, the context of the business process. Business processes without intelligence are application processing circa 1995, business intelligence without the context of the applications and business processes are BI circa 2002. Oracle is the first and only vendor to deliver on the vision.
Deliver on the promise of information technology; deliver it by making the corporation’s data assets available and usable by everyone in the organization who needs to make decisions.Single BI Foundation supports all decisions at all levels of the organization, from the top-level, strategic decisions made by executives through layers of management out to the front-line employees, bring the facts to bear on the important decisions, optimize those decisions, and drive better performance.Manage Decision-cycle like any other business process:Design the processStreamline the processCritical decisions with far-reaching implications (like pricing strategy) will cross boundariesDecision focus, drives these lists:Top 10 decisions to drive our strategyTop 20 decision that will have to go well to meet our financial goals.Use analytics to drive continuous performance improvement.
Let’s look at an integrated analytic process in action. I am a senior executive at a software company that sells hosted software over the web to consumers. Customer satisfaction is critical to my business to drive renewal revenue and to fund my R&D. Customers need to use my software to get the value out of it. We start first with an alert, this can be a message pushed to my mobile phone, or a “red” KPI on my list of critical KPIs. I see that customer satisfaction rates are low and the annual renewal rates are low. I can click on the red item, and seamlessly jump over to a customer health dashboard that summarizes the state of the business behind the KPI. I see that there are a number of issues but I also see that my support costs are high, higher than I expected. I drill into the data and find that when I segment my customer support by how they purchased the software (by looking across the CRM and Support Systems) I see that my retail customers cost much more to support than customers who buy over the web. I also discover that this is the segment of customers who are most unhappy with the software, not using it much and who are also lower in customer satisfaction and not renewing the services each year. Clearly, this is a new way to segment my customer base.I also see that the backlog of support tickets for these customers is very high. If I was to hire more support telesales team, I could work thorough this backlog as well as provide better support for these retail customers going forward. Perhaps these customers aren’t as tech savvy as the customers who buy over the web. Perhaps these customers need more help to get successful with my software. I then turn to build some what-if scenarios to estimate how much more it would cost to hire more support telesales reps, but I also need to charge more (or discount less) for customers who come in from the retail side. I can also model the reduced unit sales I will see from the higher prices and play around with other variables as well. Ultimately, I can come up with a new pricing program for the retail channel that will fund the higher support costs.I then implement the new pricing discount schedule and roll it out to my stores; the new discount schedule is automatically updated and a work flow is started to implement the new scheme. The marketing promotion workflow is also updated to reflect the new discounts. Ultimately I can now load these new updated variables into a new KPI that tracks retail support sales, discounts and support inquiries and can track these leading indicators for the annual renewals. The new KPI can monitor in the background and alert me if there are issues.
Oracle has integrated strategy management elements like scorecards and KPIs with Business Intelligence. Instead of manually populating scorecards with extracted, cleaned and polished data, we want to help companies improve their performance with the ability to integrate the critical data with the critical KPIs to drive your corporate strategy. Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management is a new capability that enabled companies to achieve alignment between top-level corporate strategic goals, cascaded through a series of objectives, and monitored in real-time through integrated KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators.Scorecard capabilities are delivered as a completely integrated capability that fully leverages the Oracle BI Server, its metadata, and the enterprise semantic model, which means that—unlike scorecard products in the market—there is full alignment between score carding and the rest of BI.KPIs are stored as reusable, core metadata objects that track owners, thresholds and history. A variety of visualizations, such as KPI watchlists, strategy maps, strategy trees, and cause and effect diagrams help define, map, and continuously monitor performance to plan.Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management doesn’t dictate a specific methodology, such as Balanced Scorecard, but instead let’s each business flexibly apply KPIs to how they would like to align strategy across their organizations.OBI Foundation leverages Oracle BI Enterprise Edition 11g to link data assets to strategy, to supportbusiness plans/models, and tie back to operational reporting. All in a connected in a single solution using shared data and metadata. Focus on decisions: outward manifestations of decision cycle:What decisions need to be made (OBIF can help prioritize, preserve limited management bandwidth to foster management by exception)Define key roles in the decision processFollow up to measure how accurate or effective decisions turn out to beManage like any other business process:Design the processStreamline the processCritical decisions with far-reaching implications (like pricing strategy) will cross boundariesDecision focus, drives these lists:Top 10 decisions to drive our strategyTop 20 decision that will have to go well to meet our financial goals.Use analytics to drive these decision-targets, how to achieve, how to improve, and to be consistent with business targets
A key innovation in Oracle BI Foundation is the first completely unified user experience that combines relational online analytic processing (ROLAP) and multidimensional online analytic processing (MOLAP). The powerful SQL-based access to relational data sources or MDX-based access to multidimensional sources is abstracted away from the end-user, they just have to know the questions they want to ask. The BI foundation manages how and where to access the information to support the analysis. Sophisticated MOLAP concepts, such as custom member selection, calculated members, and navigation of ragged and skip-level hierarchies is available right in the integrated dashboard, query, and analysis tools. Uniquely, this is not just optimized to take full advantage of Essbase, but these capabilities work across any combination or relational and multi-dimensional data sources—transparently without the user needing to care. We have done the “homework” that brings our OLAP abilities up to the full featured interface our customers have come to expect.Seamlessrelational & multidimensional browser interfaceNavigate across relational & multidimensional sourcesMicrosoft Office Integration
The New Path to Value, MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter 2011, p.23.What is challenging is that scenarios require the creation of new data, data that doesn’t exist in the ERP or CRM system, data that doesn’t exist in the data warehouse. It typically is created in a spreadsheet, from an extract from the ERP or DW, with analyst time and labor to add judgment. This is hard to do and complex to maintain. A better way would be to have a multidimensional engine, integrated as part of the larger BI foundation to help with these analyses.
To avoid the mess of spreadsheets, the Oracle BI Foundation includes the market-leading multidimensional online analytic server, Essbase. Essbase complements the BI Server by handling the creation of new data, new data that is used for model scenarios and compare between the scenarios. Also has flexibility with business model definition to easily change as the business changes.End-users can access either by the dashboards or reports or via Microsoft Office. Essbase has highly efficient data storage that supports very fast data access and retrieval. Data is organized in dimensional model, easy for end-users to understand. The powerful write back functionality create new information to power the what-if scenarios. Finally, it includes a powerful dimensional calculation engine. All supported with mission-critical scalability and performance. Essbase can pull data directly from the BI Server as well as serve as a data source into BI Server. Oracle Essbase Cube Builder keeps the metadata between these two engines in sync as well as managing security and passing the points of view between the two engines. The end-user doesn’t have to know all of this complexity, he or she simply works in an intuitive analytic environment accessing data from relational sources or multidimensional sources or some combination of both. No other BI vendor has this degree of integration. Multi-user Write-backUninterrupted analysesSecure, shared, single version of the truthFast and IntuitiveData shown how users see it – tree structureCentralized, User-orientedFunctions, calculations, consolidations
The Oracle BI Action Framework is a new innovation for BI. It allows organizations to sense conditions, perform analysis, and then directly initiate business improving actions, all from within BI dashboards and reports, whether delivered via a browser, a mobile device or via email. Oracle has had this technology for a number of years and has used it extensively in our BI Applications. With the recent release of OBI 11g, we’ve dramatically improved the ability to link objects within the BI world together as well as with objects on the application side. Action Framework is a key technology that can leverage Fusion Middleware, to bring together analytics with business processes to create intelligent business processes. The Action Framework lets companies define best practice actions to take under certain data conditions. Actions are defined in the enterprise semantic model, just in the same way as data sources are defined and mapped. Actions can include:Navigate to further analysisInitiate a business processExecute a workflowDeliver BI contentCall a Web service When a condition is triggered, the user is presented with a list of possible actions to take. Some of these might be to navigate to additional BI analysis, to collaborate with a colleague, or to initiate a defined business process.This can be a human-driven process, or even fully automated “lights out.”Oracle BI Foundation provides developers the tools to define actions, attach them conditionally to data conditions, and the integrate into standard SOA processes defined in BPEL or other external APIs.The Action Framework has the promise to get the true payoff for BI—not just to gain insight, but to turn that insight into the best business performing action.
FR: show that OBIF can power decisions all over the organizationDan Vesset at IDC recently updated this thought in a recent paper noting:Convergence of intelligent devices, social networking, pervasive broadband networking, and analytics is ushering in a new economic system that is redefining relationships among producers, distributors, and consumers. The flood of new data, the faster cycle times, and the adoption of analytics prevalent in the intelligent economy make it clear that there is both a need and an opportunity to change how decisions are made to harness these new circumstances to achieve advantage in the market. Key findings in this study include: Enterprises succeed or fail based on the decisions made by executives. They compete effectively or lose market share based on the operational decisions made by their managers. And they are more or less profitable based on the day to-day decisions of various knowledge and line workers who make up most of the workforce. In the intelligent economy, new solutions managing the process of decision making are being created, whether the decision is being made by an executive, a team, a worker, or an automated system. The need to gain greater visibility into intra- and intercompany business processes is driving accelerating demand for decision management solutions. Enterprises are also innovating in areas such as ecommerce by creating automated systems to make decisions about what to recommend to helpcustomers make decisions about what to buy. Operationally, enterprises are focused on improving the speed of identifying problems to determine how to fixthese problems to drive down costs and improve customer satisfaction. Worldwide Decision Management Software 2010 – 2014Forecast: A Fast-Growing Opportunity to Drive the Intelligent EconomyFiling Information: December 2010, IDC #226244, Volume: 1, Tab: MarketsBusiness Analytics Solutions: Market Analysis
“Oracle has the lowest total cost of ownership of the BI mega-vendors.” “Oracle has the lowest per-user costs as well as the lowest administration cost per-user. Since administration makes up as much as 75% of overall BI platform ownership costs, and these costs are recurring so BI leaders need to focus considerable attention here.”BI Platforms User Survey, 2011: Customers Rate Their BI Platform Vendor Cost of Ownershiphttp://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/oracle/article190/article190.html29 March 2011Rita L. SallamGartner Research Note G00211906 Findings:The results of this survey show that license cost is a small fraction of overall BI platform ownership cost. Those organizations looking to lower cost should look beyond license to implementation and in particular to administration costs for efficiencies. The findings below are based on Figure 2 that shows total BI platform ownership costs per cost category per product and Figure 3 which shows total BI platform ownership costs per user per product. Mega-vendors IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP Figure 2. Total Business Intelligence Platform Ownership CostLowest TCO:Oracle (OBIEE) - $2.0 million (estimate)Microsoft - $2.5 million (estimate)IBM Cognos 8 - $2.6 million (estimate)SAP BusinessObjects - $2.7 million (estimate) Figure 3. Total Business Intelligence Platform Ownership Cost Per User Cheapest:Oracle (OBIEE)IBM Cognos 8SAP BusinessObjects – Microsoft Mega-vendors, Excluding MicrosoftLarge, complex mega-vendor deployments (except Microsoft) cost the most overall, but cost less than the average on a per-user basis. (The average mega-vendor deployment covered in the survey had 3,230 users.) Small and less complex mega-vendor deployments will likely realize smaller economies of scale because they will receive smaller license discounts and cannot extend support resources over as many users. A previous Gartner survey where the average deployment size was 500 users found substantially higher per-user license costs for all mega-vendors, except Microsoft. MicrosoftMicrosoft has below-average license costs both on an absolute and a per-user basis. However, the total cost per user exceeds that of the other mega-vendors due to initial implementation and administrative costs. Administration Costs Results for Individual VendorsThe survey results show that administration makes up as much as 75% of overall BI platform ownership costs, and these costs are recurring, so BI leaders need to focus considerable attention here. Figure 12 and Figure 13 shows the total and per-user administration costs for individual BI platforms. Figure 12. Total Administration Cost Per PlatformLowest (Best) at top:Oracle (OBIEE)IBM Cognos 8SAP BusinessObjectsMicrosoft Figure 13. Total Administration Cost Per User Per PlatformLowest (Best) at the top:Oracle (OBIEE)IBM Cognos 8MicrosoftSAP BusinessObjectsLicense CostsResults for Individual Vendor ProductsLicenses represent the most visible component of BI platform cost, and most enterprises (shortsightedly) focus the bulk of their vendor comparison effort here. The different pricing and packaging models of BI platform vendors make direct comparisons difficult for BI leaders evaluating products. Using our survey data, we look at total costs and average costs per user, adjusted for the complexity of deployment (Appendix 1), to create a basis for comparison across vendor products (see Figures 6 and 7). Figure 6. Total License Cost Per Product MicrosoftOracle (OBIEE)SAP BusinessObjectsIBM Cognos 8 Implementation Costs Results for Individual Vendor ProductsOn average, implementation costs, such as for system integrators, equal roughly 60% of license costs, so they represent a significant factor in total cost. Ease of use translates into lower implementation costs in part because easy-to-use tools allow IT developers and other BI authors to develop BI content more quickly and it allows more business users to create their own reports and analysis, thereby saving the cost of IT specialists to design them (see Figure 8). In addition, tools that support less complex deployments tend to cost less to implement. Figure 8. Implementation Cost Per UserSAP BusinessObjectsIBM Cognos 8Oracle (OBIEE)Microsoft
Reusable analytic components, from bottoms up…Data model leads to reusability. I.e., Define cost model once, use in procurement, finance, get the same page reporting. A piece of data sitting in a database has some value, but when it is modeled in the Oracle BI foundation, it can be easily accessed by more users and becomes more valuable. When this piece of data is re-used and combined with other data and a KPI or metric is defined in semantic object layer, it gets more valuable, finally, in the presentation layer, the data gets re-used across multiple presentation devices and gets more valuable when it is presented to the user at the right time and at the right place. In addition, there are a number of technology changes happening that directly impact what semantic layer you choose. For example, Data connection: what is changing, what are big trends at the physical layer? Can add new data sources like relational, XML or Essbase today as well as prepare for the future iterations of data storage technology. Flexibility across functional areas to deliver enterprise-view,On the presentation layer, you can add new technologies as well, regardless of what new device walks in the door to the corporation.All three layers are undergoing massive shifts/ and will show up in additional projects to the CIO, he needs Enterprise Strategy to handle & manage.One of the key differentiators of Oracle BI EE is this notion of a common enterprise information model. Oracle BI EE leverages a unified metadata model, which is accessed by all of the end user tools, so every end user and every department has the same consistent view of information, tailored to their role. As a result, organizations no longer need to maintain multiple metadata environments for different types of users. Some leading BI tools still have different metadata for their ad hoc tools than they do for their reporting tools, or dash boarding tools. With Oracle BI EE, you “model once, deploy everywhere.”The metadata model consists of three tiers:The physical layer allows you to import the table structures of your existing data sources, so it’s simply a representation of your actual physical data structureThe semantic object layer allows you to create a simplified semantic representation of multiple data sources, creating a greatly simplified model of your business defined in a way that aligns with how business people think of it. This is where you define your data hierarchy (e.g. Quarter rolls up to Year), define dimensions and measures for multi-dimensional analysis, and create pre-defined calculations (e.g. product profitability) that will be available to all users.Then, that business model can be further simplified and exposed to end users through a range of tools through the presentation layer, which appears to end users as a single data source with a single table structure of dimensions, measures, and derived measures.This common enterprise information model enables the business to define key metrics and calculations in once place, assuring that everyone has a consistent view of information (tailored to their role) and assuring alignment across departments. Achieving this type of enterprise alignment is a problem for many organizations today. For example, let’s take something like “product profitability.” In a typical organization, you may have a sales organization that keeps their information in a CRM or SFA solution, a service group that has their own knowledge base and service call data, and a manufacturing organization that has an ERP system. The sales organization look at a particular product that is selling well and based on their limited view assume that product is really profitable. The service organization may look at the same product based on a higher than average number of calls determines that it’s a product that is hurting service margins. The manufacturing organization may look at the same product and think that due to a spike in the cost of goods required to manufacture that product, the product has a low margin relative to other products and should be de-emphasized. Without a complete and consistent view of how the company defines “product profitability”, how will the organization achieve alignment between the 3 departments?Oracle BI EE solves this problem, providing one consistent view of information and this is *where* we define the singleversion of the truth.You’ve heard a lot about getting the single version of the truth to drive your fact-based decisions, the common enterprise information model is *where* you define the single version of a metric/dimension/hierarchy. Oracle stores the common enterprise information model in our BI Server (in an RPD file, for those of you keeping score). For example, when you need to talk about an FTE, you clearly count folks in your payroll system, but do you also count the contractors who do work at your facilities, but are paid by a third party? Do you count part-time folks? How do you allocate floor space, HVAC, overhead costs? Per FTE, per employees, what about benefits? These are pretty complex questions, how you define them is unique to how you run your business. We can help. The business rules you use to define the critical measures, like an FTE, you can define precisely in our business model layer, you can also define which system and which table to pull from (pull from HR system for employees, pull from the badge system for non-employees, pull from payroll for employee costs, pull from procurement system for contractor costs, etc). The BI Server can generate the right queries, pull from the right systems, stitch it all together and give you the answer. (BI server to pull the counts of employees, shared with Essbase to do the allocation of costs across FTEs; both engines can share data & metadata…) (MDM will help make sure the org chart for the employees is consistent in the HR system, in your compensation system, in your security system …)
The biggest part of the BI Foundation reusability message is that any information defined in the common enterprise information model can be consumed by any end-user, anywhere in the organization (or outside of the organization). Model your BI once, deploy anywhere. Every form of BI imaginable….reports, scorecards, dashboards, ad hoc queries, collaboration, and integrated search…with the broadest and richest range of charts, graphs, and visualizations. You can get insight anywhere….embedded in your ERP or CRM application, a business process, enterprise portal, mobile device, MS Office applications. The visualizations are consistent no matter where they are surfaced, and more important, your metrics, calculations, definitions, security is consistent because they are all derived from a common enterprise information model and technology foundation. If data changes or the definition of a KPI changes, all end-user consumption modes are instantly updated and the business is always in synch.Oracle BI Foundation is powerful information delivery today as well as any new devices or consumption methods that might arise in the future; rest assured these future information delivery devices will also pull from the common enterprise information model for consistency, accuracy and security.e.g. Reports developed for Dashboards automatically appear and work on a Mobile device OR Could even add another slide that highlight several areas of reuse @ different levels: Reports & Analysis developed for Dashboards automatically appear everywhere e.g. On Mobile devicesONE Semantic model across all data sources, shared for all current and extended subject areasMap once to a data source for all subject areas
Uninterrupted tracking & analysis of organizational performance anytime, anywhereInvoke in-context, embedded actions from a mobile deviceReuse of same OBIEE content, including: Analyses, Reports, Actions, Agents, Scorecards*, Complex Dashboard Interactivity, Guided NavigationEnhanced with Smartphone featuresGestural interactionsOrientation RecognitionOptimized LayoutsDownload from Apple iTunes AppStoreNo learning curve – same self-service content accessed on other computersIntegrated strategy management, operational reporting, and forward-looking scenario analysisInitiate actions or workflows in response to insights from mobile deviceInstant access to existing custom, embedded, or pre-built BI Apps
Standards-based integration with existing IT infrastructure.and the integration of business intelligence technology with middleware- Open integration enables easy re-use of existing infrastructure- Open and deep integration possibilities drive the organizational penetration and reuse of BI- Low deployment barriers and costs through open integrationInstead of putting together a portfolio of infrastructure management solutions, Oracle has built a strong portfolio to address the next generation of management solutions and the all important articulation of business services. As a leader in infrastructure management solutions Oracle’s next generation of IT management solutions provides business value by addressing the integration of existing solutions and by providing a complete IT lifecycle integration of IT services into business processes.Unlike BI built on closed, non-standard technologies, Oracle BI Foundation will enable you to leverage all of your existing data assets and applications, and work seamlessly with your existing IT architecture. Highlight flexibility across integration points (Identity Management, Development Tools, Application Grid, Data Integration, SOA & Process Management, Content Management and user experience). Finally, the Oracle BI Foundation can be managed by Oracle Enterprise Manager, just like any other enterprise class asset in your organization. The net is that you can manage deployment risk and easily introduce Oracle BI Foundation and not have impacts on your downstream business processes.
PresentationEnd-user RoleWorkflowData SecurityEnd-user SecurityOracle BI Foundation is integrated with business applications and provides role-based insights. As Oracle Supports existing BI customer and Existing Applications Customers, we’ve learned a lot about how to bring these two domains together.There has been an historical separation of OLTP-basedApplications (like ERP, CRM, SCM, etc.) and DW-basedBI leading to inconsistent view of operating and financial performance. Given Oracle’s massive investment in applications, both built and acquired by Oracle, we have gained a deep understanding of how to leverage BI and integrate BI with these applications. As Oracle plans to release our Fusion Applications, you will see a lot of BI embedded in the applications. We will help you Knock down the walls between OLTP & OLAP, between data warehousing and transaction processing. The fruits of this investment are now available to you in the BI FoundationThe BI Foundation is more than just a collection of BI tools; the BI Foundation is BI tools plus additional intellectual property that Oracle has included from three areas. First, we help the largest and most successful companies with their BI projects. Second, Oracle has acquired more than 70 companies in the past 5 years and all of these acquisitions now use the BI Foundation. We’ve BI integrated both massive applications like e-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Seibel CRM and SAP to build our BI Applications as well as numerous edge applications like Primavera, Retek and [SCM]. Finally, as Oracle plans to release the next generation of Fusion Applications, a lot of the intellectual property we developed to meet the next-generation of applications is now available in the BI Foundation. Oracle is two to three years ahead of our competition with the task of embedding business intelligence with applications. We plan to re-define the BI market around this applications-driven strategy.
“Oracle customers indicate they deploy the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) platform … widest across an enterprise — regionally/nationally and globally deployed versus in a single or multiple departments — while OBIEE supports, on average, among the largest numbers of users, the highest data volume, broadest product functionality use, and highest complexity of analytic workload.”Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms27 January 2011 Rita L. Sallam, James Richardson, John Hagerty, Bill HostmannGartner RAS Core Research Note G00210036http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/oracle/article180/article180.htmlOracle StrengthsOracle customers indicate they deploy the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) platform to support among the most complex deployments in our survey. Their scope of deployments tends to be the widest across an enterprise — regionally/nationally and globally deployed versus in a single or multiple departments — while OBIEE supports, on average, among the largest numbers of users, the highest data volume, broadest product functionality use, and highest complexity of analytic workload. Oracle's OBIEE platform is considered the BI standard in more of its customers' organizations (survey respondents) than any other vendor's platform (considered a standard in 85% of their organizations compared to the survey average of 56%). Reasons cited for purchasing the OBIEE platform include: integrates with enterprise applications (36% vs. 11.4% average), overall TCO (28% vs. 12%), integrates with information infrastructure (20.6% vs. 13.2.%), product road map and future vision (18% vs. 8%), and ability to support large numbers of concurrent users (12.9% vs. 4.5%). Oracle has maintained a consistent vision of its BI platform as a key enabling technology of its overall enterprise performance management product strategy and BI application development plans. Its Action Framework delivers on its vision of "insight to action" and lets developers tie together business application thresholds and events with OBIEE-based applications. Oracle has one of the broadest sets of sales channels for the OBIEE offering, coupled with an increasingly large number of system integrators and value-added resellers incorporating OBIEE into their offerings.CautionsThe OBIEE 11g release, while being a major foundational release, had a comparatively long development and release cycle. Oracle has had a consistent application-centric vision of its product road map and has been delivering on that vision. However, it has lacked innovation around mobile, in-memory, consumerization, interactive visualization and search — Oracle has told Gartner that we can expect to see these items in upcoming releases. There has been a decline in customer support and experience in our survey responses this year, compared to those in 2010. Scores fell from above average in 2010 to just below average this year. OBIEE has some of the largest user and data volume deployments and was among the vendors with the fewest limitations to broader deployment. However, lack of budget and inability to handle required data volumes (15.4% vs. 7.7%) were cited as the primary limitations. Oracle has made investments in data mining and predictive analytics technologies as part of the Oracle database and through its Oracle Real-Time Decisions product, both of which are separate from the OBIEE platform. However, the adoption has been below the average compared to other vendors (1.66% vs. 4.1% for other vendors).
Dimensions: Users, Data Sources, Applications, Functionality.Since business requirements change rapidly, a big part of elastic information access is the ability to Start Simple and evolve – no big bang necessary, deliver end-user autonomy, within an IT-managed information layer. Start by going direct to source for from basic reporting to complex scenario modeling.Be assured that the BI Foundation will cover all of your BI needs today and support the natural evolution of your BI projects into the future. As your BI matures, BI Foundation can grow with you and deliver the analytic insights you need. Oracle has the only solution that can support a broad range of schemas (not only relational, but HFM, multidimensional, XML and SOA), go direct to source for from basic reporting to complex scenario modeling.For example, suppose you really wanted to get on top of your sales. -- The first thing you might want to do is set up weekly reports of inventory status. So, you point BI Publisher to your Sales Database, build the reports and set them up for weekly delivery. Once that is implemented, you might want to compare planned inventory that is kept in spreadsheets with actuals in the DB. So you set implement the BI Server to get a full picture of actuals and targets.-- Next, you connect to the EDW and you can make the information part of your management and expose to senior executives via dashboards and to your analysts by ad-hoc. -- Next, you need to start anticipating the future, you pull critical data from your pre-packaged applications like CRM and financials and build out your forecasts. You can then build what-if scenarios to optimize what is the best decision to take. -- You then track KPI performance against CXO-ready Scorecards.-- Finally, you set up an automated monitoring process to watch the future performance and only alert if conditions exceed thresholds, we’re a big believer in management by exception and the BI Foundation helps you preserve your limited personal bandwidth to track every process.
A key measure of success of BI and data warehousing is to have many business users across several lines of business accessing and using business intelligence to make better decisions faster. This means that you want to deliver a full range of capabilities to address different roles, styles and decision making needs. Business demand the freedom to choose how they will access and analyze corporate information. -- They may prefer to manage by exception, so they only “react” to information. They are happy with reports that are delivered when certain conditions are met. Or, when new information is available. They may want regular reports or dashboards presented in a consistent and timely way. -- Others will be more proactive. They want the freedom to access any information from anywhere. -- They may need real-time access to operational data or may do more strategic analysis that links key metrics across the business in a scorecard. To get your ROI in information, BI needs to be into the hands of more users. AND, to make sure that those users are productive in the environment. IT also has a critical role to play. IT needs to ensure the integrity of the information. They also need to ensure that security is appropriately applied and that they can cost effectively scale to meet the demands of more data and more users. There is a no compromise BI solution that can meet the needs of both business and technology – to streamline IT costs without compromising the needs of business for speed, flexibility and choice.
The diversity of our customer base means there are a lot of different ways they might want to deploy BI, including Cloud models.Most customers still deploy BI on site, in single or multi-server clustered configurations.Oracle BI is 100% cloud ready, for single or multi tenant private or public Saas deployments. (Oracle CRM OnDemand is an example of BI used as part of a SaaS offering because the CRM offering includes some analytics. A number of customers deliver BI beyond their firewalls to their customers and suppliers. Linkshare, Gallup are examples)Oracle offers hosted BI and EPM options through Oracle OnDemand.
Oracle’s answer to these challenges is the new Oracle BI Foundation. The only BI platform on the market that is built to last and made for change.First Intelligent Business Process Improve Business Performance by linking insight to action Intelligent Decision Cycles enables you to improve business performance by linking insights with processes, simplifying scenario analysis and aligning scorecards to strategy,and ensure follow-throughLowest Cost of Ownership Reusable analytic assets improve productivity and provide consistent enterprise metrics Reusable Analytic Assets lower costs by improving user productivity and providing consistency of enterprise metricsand ensure confidence in consistent numbersStart Simple and Evolve Manage risk with single analytic framework across a range of schemas and deployment options Manage risk with analytic agility: Start Simple and evolve, knock down data silos, and drive standards-based integration with existing IT). The benefit is that Oracle BI Foundation delivers the lowest total cost of ownership for an organization. The Oracle BI Foundation is built to last and made for change; this means that customers can deploy the analytic functionality they need from a single BI tool set.