Oracle Magazine - January/February 2011

to reflect the values compared to the thresholds you chose earlier.

CREATING A SCORECARD

Now that you have defined your KPIs, you can arrange them into a simple scorecard to help achieve your organization’s goals. Using this scorecard, you will define an objective, “Improve Performance,” that breaks down into two contributing objectives, “Increase Sales” and “Maintain Margins.” Users will be able to use this scorecard to view progress toward the organization’s goal, either for all product categories or for any one category in particular.

To create the scorecard, take the following steps: Log in to Oracle Business Intelligence 1.

Enterprise Edition 11 g using your username and password, and select New -> Scorecard. When prompted, name the scorecard Organizational Performance and click OK to accept the default scorecard settings.

With the new scorecard open, navigate to 2. the Strategy panel at the top left corner of the screen and click the Create Objective button. Name the new objective Improve Performance, and click the Save button just above the text box to save the new objective to the scorecard definition.

With the objective you just created 3. selected in the Strategy panel, repeat this process to create another objective, naming it Increase Sales (this new objective should be located under the Improve Performance objective, to indicate that it contributes to the broader objective).

When adding this new objective, assign a KPI to it. To do so, use the Catalog panel on the bottom left of the screen and drag and drop the Sales Performance KPI onto the Objectives and KPIs list for the objective. Click OK to save this objective.

Now repeat the previous step, with the 4.
Improve Performance objective initially
selected—but this time creating a third
objective, Maintain Margins—and
associate the Margin Maintenance KPI
with it.
Your Strategy panel within the score-
card should now have a primary objective,
Improve Performance, with two con-
tributing objectives, Increase Sales and
Maintain Margins, under it. To complete
the initial scorecard, you will now create a
strategy tree to show how these objectives
are related.
To create a new strategy tree, navigate
to the Strategy panel at the top left of
the screen and this time click the View
Strategy Tree button. When the strategy
tree appears, expand the entries under the
objectives to see the KPIs and their values,
as shown in Figure 4.

This strategy tree shows that the Sales Performance objective is being met across all product categories but the Maintain Margin objective is not, contributing to a warning about the overall objective. Use the dimension selector above the strategy tree to focus on individual product categories to see how each of them is performing against the targets and the thresholds you defined earlier.

Figure 4: Displaying scorecard objectives in a strategy tree

targets and thresholds to enable them to measure progress across the organization. Oracle ss Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11 g gives you the ability to define these objectives and strategies within your BI environment, bringing this important measure of corporate performance to the desktops of everyone on your team. 

Mark Rittman is an
Oracle ACE director and
cofounder of Rittman
Mead Consulting, a U.K.-
based Oracle partner
providing specialized
BI, data warehousing, and performance
management solutions.