Oracle Magazine - November/December 2010

“Other than certain types of financial analysis, which we perform with Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition can deliver almost everything we need,” Blackmore says. “The most-interesting developments we see in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g have to do with the extent to which we can integrate BI into our wider application stack. BI can’t be a silo anymore.”

Michael Blackmore, an enterprise architect at B T, says the company’s thousands of BI users shouldn’t have to go to one place for business processes and another to generate reports. “The capability to seamlessly embed reporting into business processes is incredibly important for us,” says Blackmore.

of communications solutions and services. With more than 16 million customers worldwide—from individual consumers to government departments and multinational companies—BT provides networked IT services, telecommunications services, and broadband and internet products and services. The London, England–based company depends on more than 5,000 information systems and applications to run this diverse business.

There are currently many thousands of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition users throughout BT, with approximately 50 development teams accessing and delivering Oracle BI solutions. To increase cohesion among its far-flung management staff, BT is in the process of standardizing on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11 g and gradually shedding other BI tools.

UNIFIED, INTEGRATED, SELF-SERVICE BI Historically, BI relied on disconnected processes—mining data from warehouses, running analytics, and deploying dashboards —to improve the decision-making process. But today’s modern BI solutions integrate all this within a unified infrastructure, adding embedded analytics, multidimensional analysis, geospatial analysis, and more, while enabling self-service BI.

As Blackmore sees it, the thousands of BI
users at BT shouldn’t have to go to one place to
operate their business processes and another
place to generate reports. Instead, BI should
be “intrinsic to the business processes that our
applications are delivering so we can simul-
taneously inform people with information,
allow them to make a decision, and then take
action on that decision—all from one page,”
he says. “We view Oracle Business Intelligence
Enterprise Edition 11 g not just as an add-on
to a set of applications, not as something that
stands alone, but as something that is very
much part of the business process and the
application itself,” Blackmore relates. “The
capability to seamlessly embed reporting into
business processes is incredibly important for
us. One of the key benefits we obtain from our
investment in Oracle is a cohesive set of tools and applications and
the capability to combine BI and business activity monitoring in one
sensible, manageable environment that we can embed back into the
applications and processes themselves.”

OPERATIONAL ANALYTICS

With Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11 g, multiple modes of reporting, analysis, and collaboration have been supplemented by the Action Framework, a new feature that enables actions to be initiated directly from a dashboard.

Dan Vesset, program vice president of business analytics research at IDC, a global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events headquartered in Framingham, Massachusetts, sees this as a natural progression for enterprise customers. “In general,