Oracle Magazine - November/December 2010

ANALYST’S CORNER B Y DAVID BAUM
Self-Service Business
Intelligence
Extend analytics to people and
processes throughout the organization.

Oracle Magazine spoke with Dan Vesset, program vice president of business
analytics research at International Data
Corporation (IDC), about the capabilities cus-
tomers look for in enterprise business intel-
ligence (BI) software.
Oracle Magazine: Today’s advanced BI tools
include business process management capa-
bilities that can trigger events directly from
within a BI workflow. How do customers use
these capabilities?
Vesset: During the last three decades, most
BI deployments have been focused mainly
on information access. These applica-
tions deliver information to an individual
who takes action based on what he or she
learns. Advancements such as the Action
Framework feature in Oracle Business
Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g help cus-
tomers create complete decision processes
in which the insight gained from a report
or dashboard can feed directly into another
business process, along with recommenda-
tions for what action to take. Whether it’s
an individual taking action, people collabo-
rating on a project, or the BI tool triggering
an action within another application, users
don’t have to make an obvious shift from one
application to another to complete the task.
Oracle Magazine: Today’s BI platform
vendors are working to unify BI and perfor-
mance management within their toolsets.
How will this help organizations?
Vesset: Generic query and reporting tools,
which are traditionally associated with BI,
can be used for the purpose of performance
management. Yet most people define perfor-
mance management as a structured process
that involves managing strategic goals that
are defined by operational KPIs [key perfor-
mance indicators]. Some BI vendors offer
prebuilt functionality to manage and monitor
KPIs, along with a toolset to keep track of
those KPIs. Conversely, performance manage-
ment tools often include BI dashboards along
with the capability to query, drill down, and
perform multidimensional analysis. Most
organizations will likely require both prebuilt
performance management functionality and
the flexibility of general-purpose BI tools, and
both play a key part in establishing and sus-
taining a performance management initiative.
Oracle Magazine: How important is it to have
prebuilt KPIs, scorecards, and calculations
within the toolset?
Vesset: There are both cultural and technical
benefits to having this type of broad semantic
layer. Culturally, the semantic layer and the
metadata that is part of it help establish a
common language within the company. A lot
of the challenges that organizations face with
BI and performance management revolve
around creating a common understanding
of KPIs and metrics. Different people and
groups must come together and agree on
these definitions, so that when somebody
looks at a metric such as profitability,
everybody knows what’s behind it—what it
means and where the data comes from. It’s
not just a systems issue but also a training
issue, because a predefined KPI circumvents
these communication issues among the
workforce. Technically, packaged KPIs help
customers make quick progress with BI and
performance management implementa-
tions. Obviously a vendor can’t anticipate and
prebuild all the potential KPIs that any given
customer wants, but a vendor can go a long
way toward that goal, whether it’s 50 percent
or 75 percent or 90 percent of the content
that any given customer requires.
Oracle Magazine: Are packaged analytic
applications becoming popular for these
same reasons?

Vesset: Yes, some of the same reasoning pertains to analytic applications, which include application-specific and business-process-specific content and workflows that have been designed for specific business functions. Analytic applications encourage best practices that have been incorporated into the product based on the vendor’s experience with many similar projects. They are popular because they “speak the language” of the business users and because the vendor has done a lot of the hard work building KPIs and defining metadata constructs. Oracle Magazine: How are BI tool vendors responding to user demands? Vesset: Users continue to demand BI capabilities, but unfortunately there is not enough I T support at most organizations to keep up with those constantly changing demands. Vendors are addressing the need to simplify maintenance, management, and support functions for an ever-growing population of users, which will help organizations support these enterprise BI deployments more efficiently. 

David Baum ( david@dbaumcomm.com) is a freelance business writer based in Santa Barbara, California.

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