Oracle Magazine - November/December 2010

you could categorize BI into two seg-
ments. One is based on exploration
and ad hoc analysis; the other is more
operational, transaction-oriented, or
part of a business process flow,” Vesset
says. “Oracle’s new Action Framework
feature advances this latter category of
BI functions.”
BT’s Blackmore believes that
Oracle’s new multidimensional
analysis and geospatial visualiza-
tion capabilities will also be very
important to BT’s asset-intensive
operation, which spans 160 countries. From trucks to antennas
and from office buildings to network control centers, being able to
analyze assets in conjunction with geographic data will help the
organization pinpoint problems and control costs. With these new
capabilities in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11 g,
everyone from departmental administrators to people charged with
facilities management can access geospatial data without having to
be geographic information system specialists. “Much of our infor-
mation is tied to specific geographies,” he says. “Oracle Business

“Being able to treat KPIs
as data sets lets you pull
them straight into your
reporting applications.
It also makes it easier to
sell new BI capabilities to

—Michael Blackmore, Enterprise Architect, BT

information with BI information in a
homogeneous way.”
“If you have spatial information in
your database, then you can access it
through your analytics just as easily
as you can display data in a pie chart,”
explains Paul Rodwick, vice president of
product management at Oracle.

According to Rodwick, one of the strengths of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 10g was its capability to easily access many different datasources across the orga-

nization, including data warehouses, data marts, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11 g creates a common enterprise information model that logically relates all those datasources and makes them more accessible to reports and dashboards.

ENHANCED PERFORMANCE ME TRICS

Customers who are implementing and standardizing on performance management initiatives also stand to benefit from BI integration. BT is serious about performance management, espe-

Action Framework

INSIGHT INTO ACTION

Business intelligence (BI) delivers essential information about how your business is performing. But acting on that information means completely exiting the BI environment—until now. The new Action Framework feature in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g connects the gaps between BI and action. It allows users to detect conditions, perform analysis, and directly initiate appropriate action from within BI dashboards and reports via browser, mobile device, or e-mail. The Action Framework lets organizations define best-practice actions (either human-initiated or fully automated) to take under certain data conditions. When a condition is triggered, the user is presented with a list of possible actions—navigate for additional analysis, collaborate with a colleague, or initiate a defined business process.

WIDEST CHOICE OF END USER ACCESS

COMPLETE

E
T
T
E
C

1

Sales rep Mike Smith receives an out-of-stock alert on his mobile device and learns he’s unable to fulfill an important order for a new product from a key account.

D
L
E
Z
Y

2

From the same interface, Mike reviews all customer orders for the new product, and analyzes inventory and availability in order to expedite service to the key account.

A
N
A

e
s
I
n
t
e
n
s
l
l
i
i
g
s

Common
Enterprise
Information
Model

e
u
n
B
c
e
e
l
S
c
e
a
r
r
O
v
e
r

INTEGRATED

T
C

Mike then initiates a change request, updates discount terms for the key account,

and notifies the key account of an estimated delivery date and discount. 3

A

The Common Enterprise Information Model is a semantic layer that allows end users to access all datasources and create their own reports and queries, without knowing where the data is or how it's structured. It also ensures consistency for all calculations, metrics, and definitions, no matter where they are surfaced.