Stackowiak / Rayman / Greenwald Oracle(R) Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions

1. Auflage 2007
ISBN: 978-1-312-60395-0
Verlag: bookbaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 387 Seiten

Up-to-date, comprehensive coverage of the Oracle database and business intelligence tools Written by a team of Oracle insiders, this authoritative book provides you with the most current coverage of the Oracle data warehousing platform as well as the full suite of business intelligence tools.You'll learn how to leverage Oracle features and how those features can be used to provide solutions to a variety of needs and demands. Plus, you'll get valuable tips and insight based on the authors' real-world experiences and their own implementations. Avoid many common pitfalls while learning best practices for: Leveraging Oracle technologies to design, build, and manage data warehouses Integrating specific database and business intelligence solutions from other vendors Using the new suite of Oracle business intelligence tools to analyze data for marketing, sales, and more Handling typical data warehouse performance challenges Uncovering initiatives by your business community, security business sponsorship, project staffing, and managing risk

Autoren/Hrsg.

Stackowiak, Robert

Rayman, Joseph

Greenwald, Rick

Leseproben

The use of the term business intelligence is a signpost for the evolution of technology in today's business climate. Many years ago, the use of computers was referred to as data processing, highlighting the core purpose of that technology — to collect, store, and manipulate data. This term was superceded by the term information technology, focusing on a higher-level use of data — not just raw data, but information that is more usable by humans. Business intelligence brings it all back home, zeroing in on the ultimate purpose of technology in a business environment — to help organizations increase efficiency, profits, and revenue, as well as using data to make intelligent decisions. Business intelligence is gained by the timely display of data to business analysts enabling them to make the best possible business decisions and helping organizations steer their ships of commerce, rather than simply acting as the fuel to run those boats. This chapter looks at a number of offerings Oracle has created to deliver business intelligence from the data collected by and residing in Oracle's enterprise transactional applications. We'll also cover the role of Oracle's Balanced Scorecard and using Oracle's data hubs to create a master data reference in order to access data from a variety of transactional applications. All of these products are designed to deliver timely business intelligence to the less-technical user — from business analysts to business executives who will be making decisions based on that information. Transactional Business Intelligence Before moving on to specific concepts and products, you should understand the meaning of the title of this chapter. Transactional business intelligence is a term that highlights gaining business intelligence in real-time through access to data that resides in online transaction processing (OLTP) databases.1 In Oracle's E-Business Suite of Applications, this data is stored in a unified data model. Since data across many business areas is represented in this unified data model, Oracle can create pre-build applications that deliver business intelligence in an easy-to-use and consistent format. By using a single data model, users can easily see across the boundaries sometimes imposed by separate functional areas of a business and executives can look back over limited historical data (since data is not typically retained for long periods in an operational system) and project into future scenarios for the entire business of the organization. And, of course, a single data model makes it much easier for Oracle applications to deliver a standardized set of reports and metrics for business analysts and executives. This solution is a bit different from creation of data warehouses that are separated from the stores of transactional data. Data warehouses are typically deployed to isolate the potential performance impact of complex unplanned queries operating on large amounts of data, or to create different data designs to efficiently service these queries, or to store a consolidated cleansed source of data apart from the different sources. By their nature, classic data warehouses often have somewhat older data than transactional systems, with data loads ranging from every minute to hourly to daily to weekly. (We cover classic data warehousing in most of the other chapters in this book.) Business Terminology Business people will sometimes complain that technologists speak language that they cannot understand using a set of descriptions and concepts that they find foreign. However, a business intelligence discussion can introduce another set of jargon that can appear just as confusing. This section is intended to define and describe some key concepts that are used throughout this chapter. If you already are familiar with them, feel free to jump to the next section. Corporate Performance Management Corporate performance management (CPM) is the process of using business intelligence to assess how well a business or portion of a business is performing. Reports are leveraged that highlight the most important metrics measuring this performance. Oracle often uses this term to categorize all business intelligence offerings that are built on transactional applications, data hubs, and application-specific data warehouses. CPM is sometimes also referred to as business performance management (BPM). In Oracle's E-Business Suite, the offerings provide access to transactional business results and include a feedback loop to allow users to track the effects of process changes to continually refine the processes. Similar PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications capabilities are delivered through the PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) data warehouse described in Chapter 3. The Siebel applications also have a data warehouse solution primarily focused on customer relationship management (CRM) that is also described in Chapter 3. Oracle announced, in 2006, a stated direction to combine all of these business intelligence models into a unified analytic and CPM model referred to as Fusion Business Intelligence. Key Performance Indicators Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the metrics used to determine how well a business or business unit is performing. Simple KPIs might include metrics like profit and loss, but even simple metrics can become quite complex in larger organizations. An example KPI would be the percentage of the overhead of a shipping department that is charged for individual units shipped. The process of simply defining appropriate metrics to measure and track this type of information can provide significant insight into the way a business operates. KPIs can be defined within horizontal business areas (for example, Financial, Human Resources, Supply Chain) or can be industry vertical specific (for example, airplane landing and take-off turnaround). Dashboard A business intelligence dashboard provides a function similar to the dashboard in your car in that it displays the most important information you need to drive your business. In more technical jargon, it is simply a portal page that displays key performance indicators as data and charts and can provide a means to further drill into detail. A dashboard or portal page can contain multiple portlets representing different results and interfaces. COMPLIANCE AND CORPORATE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT When delivering solutions to satisfy a dizzying array of compliance regulations (Sarbanes-Oxley, Graham-Leach-Bliley, Bassel II Accords, HIPAA, Patriot Act, and others), CPM and business intelligence compliance initiatives should also provide additional business value. But, delivering KPIs to CPM dashboards only fulfills part of compliance requirements. Compliance regulations also introduce a need for more data auditability, more control of who accesses data and can change it, improved system testing procedures, and the ability to verify the accuracy of data at any given point in time. As previously mentioned in this book, business intelligence projects require close coordination between business users and IT. In compliance projects, typical key business partners to IT should include the Finance and Legal departments within an organization. Many organizations choose to create formal compliance teams that include all of these key parties when implementing such solutions. For example, each page in an Oracle Daily Business Intelligence module or an Oracle Balanced Scorecard is displayed as a portal page. These portal pages can also be displayed as portlets and with other portlets on a single page. Dashboards have been called the killer application for business executives, since a dashboard can present information from a variety of sources and provide a quick and easy-to-understand high-level view of business operations. Simple views can be misleading when they inaccurately represent the actual state of the underlying business operations. Although key performance indicators used in Oracle applications such as Daily Business Intelligence and Balanced Scorecard have been carefully chosen and designed to monitor appropriate business data, even these KPIs might be misleading if the data residing in the source systems is not valid.2 Oracle's Daily Business Intelligence Business intelligence can be defined as the process of taking large amounts of data, analyzing that data, and presenting a high-level set of reports that condense the essence of that data into the basis of business actions. Daily business intelligence (DBI) is a term used by Oracle to describe high-level reports and charts that display KPIs from data in transaction tables in Oracle's E-Business Suite, enabling management to make fundamental daily business decisions. DBI was introduced in 2003. It was made available as an Oracle patch to E-Business Suite release 11i.9 and has been included in Oracle E-Business Suite applications since release 11i.10. Each subsequent release of DBI has delivered an increasing number of KPIs. Since the reports and charts are pre-built around Oracle's E-Business Suite of Applications, deployment is greatly accelerated. Business people can quickly gain access to these reports since administrators and developers do not have to spend time creating the infrastructure from scratch. Figure 2-1 illustrates the E-Business Suite Navigator that is used to access to various DBI modules. Typical key steps in an implementation start with determining which dashboards to deploy and which KPIs to disable, and then determining user responsibilities and assignments, whether you want to customize buckets (how data is grouped) in the dashboards, set-up of item dimensions, and determining...