MIPRO Unfiltered » oracle bi

Oracle Enters Enterprise Search & Data Management Market

Jeff Ventura — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:39:28 +0000

So the news is this: Oracle bought Endeca, a search and data management company. Smart move. Enterprise search has long been lacking, especially when it comes to searching unstructured data, and now Oracle will have a very compelling differentiator for its business intelligence and analytics platforms.

Here’s TechCrunch on the deal:

Endeca’s core technology enables companies to correlate and analyze unstructured data and provides enterprise search for large companies including Borders, Boeing, the Census Bureau, the EPA, Ford, Hallmark, IBM, and Toshiba. The company specializes in guided search, and auto-categorizing results based on the keywords someone enters. Endeca charges from $100,000 to more than $10 million per installation.

Endeca’s InFront offering allows businesses with tools for advanced merchandising and content targeting for e-commerce. And Endeca Latitude enables businesses to rapidly develop analytic applications that draw information and data from unstructured and structured sources together.

An aside: I wonder what this means for Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search product?

Also, there is some speculation that the sound we all just heard was Oracle entering the search space, but I don’t this move is that broad. They’re going to nail enterprise search like nobody else has before. Watch.

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It’s All About the ROI: The Value of Oracle BI Apps for PeopleSoft (Part III)

Larry Zagata — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:19:22 +0000

Previously, we have discussed the value of Oracle BI apps for PeopleSoft, and we have examined some key implementation considerations. Today, in this final post on the topic, I would like to chat about the biggest buzzword of them all: ROI.

The key question for many customers is this: does it really make sense to buy the BI apps versus build something from scratch? In order to discuss ROI, we first must clear the air about build vs. buy and ROI calculations. In this scenario, remember we are talking not only about the reports, dashboards, metrics and source PeopleSoft system analysis, but also about the data warehouse structure and all of the associated ETL scripts.

When we talk about ROI, we are really talking about two types: “hard” ROI which translates to real, measureable cost savings and soft ROI which is less measurable but still benefits the organization. Hard ROI is a challenging one to pinpoint in a blog post, as it really is very much dependent upon each organization’s specific circumstances. To accommodate this for the purposes of this post, we will generalize some hard ROI statements and focus more on the soft ROI of the BI apps.

HARD ROI

No one deploys technology for the fun of it; in the enterprise, it is deployed to solve problems and drive to a business objective. The task at hand is to understand these problems and validate them. For evaluating hard ROI, I suggest you start with these two important questions:

What will your organization be able to do with the BI apps that you could not do prior to implementing them?
What problems will be resolved through the use of the BI apps that were unsolvable before the project was started?

By asking these two key questions, it should unlock some real information for hard ROI calculations. Let’s look at a couple of quick examples:

Based upon better business intelligence as a result of deploying the BI apps, it is estimated inventory can be better controlled and inventory values can be reduced by 10% or $1,000,000, resulting in a better control of cash.
Based upon better business intelligence as a result of deploying the BI apps, it is estimated to reduce purchasing costs by 5% or $200,000.

Again, these will be very specific for each organization and will take some time to calculate. Regardless of what any vendor will try to sell you, there is no magic hard ROI calculator that’s accurate for every business. I haven’t seen one yet.

Next, let’s look at a small part of the BI apps — the reports. If we look at how many reports and dashboards there are in the Procurement and Spend Analytics app and make some assumptions based upon experience, we can start building out some ROI. Here’s a basic example case.

The Procurement and Spend Analytics app contains: 2 dashboards, 14 dashboard pages, 103 reports, 161 metrics. Let’s run some basic numbers.

Assume that each report is of simple complexity. Simple is defined as simple formatting and groupings, standard calculations such as totals, sums, averages etc. Standard graphs and charts. 8 hours to design, develop and unit test. (Note: Most likely there will be a mix of low, medium and high complex reports. 8 hours is low if you consider requirements gathering and the source system analysis is included in this time. 8 hours is conservative to get buy in; choose a realistic effort for your organization.)
If each report is 8 hours then 103 * 8 = 824 hours of work, or 20.6 weeks of effort. This does not include dashboards and dashboard pages. This also does not include any data structure or ETL work or metrics analysis

Make sure you agree upon any “estimates” you utilize with others in the organization so the ROI calculation is accepted internally.

SOFT ROI

Soft ROI is much more fun to talk about. It can cover so many intangibles that are valuable to the organization. Identify enough of those intangibles, even if you can’t quantify them with dollars, and the ROI discussion becomes pretty evident.

Let’s start out with some general ROI statements about building a BI solution vs. buying one.

According to TDWI Research, the average data warehousing project costs $1.1 million and takes 10 months to deliver, while a data mart project costs $544,000 and takes six months to deliver. (1)
One leading BI implementer has estimated that the cost of deploying a custom solution is typically 2.5 to 3.5 times greater than the cost estimate of deploying prebuilt applications. (2)
When you add everything up, we estimate about 7X the cost/effort to deliver a similar piece of custom-developed functionality as prebuilt BI apps. (3)

These statements in themselves are pretty powerful when discussing the cost and value of building a solution that equates the same functionality that the BI apps provide.

Let’s further explore some of the soft value statements of pre-built BI applications:

More timely access to information
Improved decision making
Improved performance (no reports against the transaction system)
BI embedded into the business process. With BI apps, users appear to stay within the PeopleSoft application.
Total Cost of Ownership (BI apps are supported and maintained)
Baseline data warehouse in place, providing a foundation to add additional data sources and additional content. It’s a great “foundation.”
Industry-standard defined measurements

Additionally, here are some soft value statements regarding the Oracle BI apps specifically:

Oracle development takes care of the following activities:

Requirements gathering
Data structure and dimensions
Naming standards & industry KPIs
Change data capture design
Metadata
Source system review
Alerts and triggers
ETL design and development
Reports and dashboards design and development
Support, maintenance and upgrades
Enabling BI within PeopleSoft or embedding BI into the business process (seamless integration)

Hopefully this makes clear of the potential of building a “soft ROI” business case for the BI apps. There is a lot of value that cannot always be added up monetarily, but many of these soft ROI factors certainly add up in manpower, time and effort to benefit to solving business problems.

This post concludes this three-part series on this topic. If you’re interested in learning more, please email me and I will be happy to discuss your plans with you. We do a lot of BI work here at MIPRO, a great deal of which is focused around planning and intelligently building out BI cases for clients.

CITATIONS

(1) From In Search of a Single Version of Truth: Strategies for Consolidating Analytic Silos by Wayne Eckerson, TDWI Best Practices Report, 2004 (www.tdwi.org/research/reportseries). Technically, the numbers are for consolidating data warehouses, but the common approach for consolidation was starting from scratch.

(2) The Business Intelligence Consulting Group, “The Great Debate: Buy Versus Build,” 2007

(3) Jeff McQuigg – Independent consultant. IT Toolbox Blog 3/17/2008

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Previously by Larry Zagata:

Related whitepapers (PDF):

MiPro’s Business Intelligence Manifesto: Six Requirements for an Effective BI Deployment

Related Services:

The Value of Oracle BI Apps for PeopleSoft (Part II)

Larry Zagata — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:49:18 +0000

Now that I have provided my opinion and thumbs up approval of the Oracle BI apps, let’s discuss the nuances of implementing them.

With all of Oracle BI’s pre-built ETL, data structures and reports, one would probably think it should be very straightforward. Well, if your shop is totally vanilla and you accept the metrics as Oracle defines them, then yes, the implementation would be pretty uncomplicated. Oracle’s BI apps are built on the excellent OBIEE platform, which is proven, scalable and stable. The metrics are based upon industry standards.

But that doesn’t mean its out-of-box metrics are your metrics. I’ll get to that in a second.

Regardless of whether or not you’re a vanilla install, you still have the technical aspects of installation and configuration of the OBIEE foundation, as well as the installation and configuration of the BI apps. Depending on your security needs, your platform and overall size of your infrastructure will determine the relative ease or complexity of this installation and configuration. And remember, with any installation we aren’t simply installing to get the product available for use – we want to install in the appropriate manner for stability, scalability, failover and maintenance. These are big deals.

Aside from the technical install and configuration, the core time and effort it takes to implement will depend on two primary considerations:

First: As hinted at before, how vanilla or customized is your PeopleSoft solution? As you may have discovered, when you customize any ERP application it makes patches, maintenance and upgrades more challenging because you have changed source code, tables, fields etc. Likewise, if you have customizations it also affects the Oracle BI apps. You have to understand the changes, because they will impact the ETL scripts, data structures, reports and dashboards. For any change you make, you have to understand if the Oracle BI apps are impacted by that change and make the appropriate changes to the BI app.

Second: How does your business process map to the metrics? If you agree with the out-of-box metrics and how they are measured, then there is little to change here other than testing to ensure results. However, if your preferred metric is different than how the BI app’s metric is defined, then you either have to change your measurement preference or make the changes to the BI app.

Here is an example. Let’s say the BI app measures invoice payment terms as starting at the point the invoice is generated. This means that the due date and all of the reports use the invoice print date as the date the clock starts ticking. If your organization uses the anticipated receipt date the customer receives the invoice as the date the clock starts ticking, you have to change your measurement or change the metric in the BI app. A simple example, but hopefully you get the point. Bottom line is that there has to be some deliberate thought given to these seemingly pedestrian details.

One of the key activities of implementing BI apps is indulging this requirements gathering fit/gap process to define and evaluate the two factors mentioned above. This activity as absolutely crucial and often ignored by many organizations, who later complain that their BI systems aren’t effective. So, the best approach is not to try for the golden plug-and-play, but instead to perform the necessary planning and design first. I can’t stress this enough.

Next post, we will explore some ROI on Oracle’s BI apps. Stick around!

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Previously by Larry Zagata:

Related whitepapers (PDF):

MiPro’s Business Intelligence Manifesto: Six Requirements for an Effective BI Deployment

Related Services:

The Value of Oracle BI Apps For PeopleSoft

Larry Zagata — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:12:54 +0000

Having practical experience in supply chain, PeopleSoft ERP (SCM) and Business Intelligence (BI), I am naturally drawn to anything that combines the attributes of all three. Oracle BI applications for procurement and spend can do just that. We have spoken previously about how PeopleSoft query tools are BI tools and not a full-on BI enterprise product. That said, there is a completely integrated solution offered by Oracle that is just as user friendly.

As we all know, there are literally thousands of tables in PeopleSoft and tens of thousands of fields. To boot, since PeopleSoft is a transaction-based system, there are many different statuses of these transactions. Imagine the work required to sort through all of those tables and fields AND choose the right status/disposition in order to develop effective business intelligence. Remember, we are not talking about simple reports, but true business intelligence that provides insight into your business operations and is aligned with executive-facing strategic objectives.

With Oracle BI apps, Oracle has pre-packaged all of that work of mapping tables, fields and statuses. It’s already done. Additionally, they’ve built the required Oracle data warehouse structure to support BI and all of the required ETL scripts to extract, transform and load the data. This means that a tremendous amount of the work has been accomplished even before a single report or dashboard has been created. On top of all of that, there are hundreds of reports, metrics and dashboards. In fact, in the Procurement and Spend Analytics alone there are 161 metrics, 103 reports, 14 dashboard pages and two dashboards.

That’s impressive.

If you were to perform the investigation of thousands of tables and fields, choose the correct status, design and develop an appropriate the data warehouse structure, design and develop ETL scripts, establish the 161 metrics, and design/develop the 103 reports, I think you’d quickly realize how much time and effort it really takes to accomplish this. It’s a massive chunk of work, and to have that pre-packaged with Oracle BI apps is a godsend. Further, the maintenance and task of keeping the products in sync is taken care of through maintenance releases. This can be a huge advantage in and of itself, as every time a patch is applied it has the potential to impact the downstream BI.

Finally, another huge advantage I see is that the Oracle BI apps help achieve one of the most strategic goals of business intelligence: embedding BI into the business process. With Oracle BI apps, the integration is very tight, almost seamless, as users move from PeopleSoft apps to BI. They may not even realize they are using different applications, and as a result BI becomes part of their daily routine and adds value to the core organization.

There are many other benefits to these solutions and I have only highlighted a few. In my next post, we’ll discuss different considerations when implementing Oracle BI apps. In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments about this — or are considering Oracle BI yourself — please email me and I’ll help you sort out your options. I’d love to hear from you.

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Previously by Larry Zagata:

Related whitepapers (PDF):

MiPro’s Business Intelligence Manifesto: Six Requirements for an Effective BI Deployment

Related Services:

ANNOUNCEMENT: Two new whitepapers now available (PeopleSoft + Business Intelligence)

Jeff Ventura — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:52:15 +0000

These have been circulating on our Twitter feed, but for all of our new blog visitors (hi everyone!), I thought I’d post our recently-published whitepapers here. They are:

PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: An Introduction and Overview of Benefits, by David Brunet

An overview of PeopleSoft Maintenance Management and its superiority relative to point solutions. This paper discusses the MM/ALM-centric aspects of integration, business process optimization, reporting/analysis and implementation. Authored by David Brunet, one of North America’s foremost experts on PeopleSoft Maintenance Management.

MiPro’s Business Intelligence Manifesto: Six Requirements for an Effective BI Deployment, by Larry Zagata

An examination of top requirements for executing a top-performing Business Intelligence (BI) system that can strategically guide a company’s decision-making. The fundamentals of this whitepaper can serve as checklist to help avoid pitfalls and drive a successful BI program. Major discussion themes are MiPro Consulting’s top suggestions for deploying effective BI along with real-world, front-line business examples to illustrate the value of adhering to these best practices. Authored by Larry Zagata, one of North America’s most recognized names in real-world BI consulting and delivery.

These are both behind landing pages, but we kept them short. Seriously.

Enjoy, and of course, all feedback is welcome. If you have thoughts, comments or questions, contact us directly or give us a shake on Twitter.

Related:

MIPRO bi (additional detail on MiPro’s Business Intelligence services)

PeopleSoft (additional detail on MiPro’s PeopleSoft Enterprise services)

MiPro Business Intelligence: our new services practice is live

Jeff Ventura — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:47:49 +0000

Today, if you’ve been scanning the wires, you’ll note that we’ve announced a brand-new services arm focusing on Business Intelligence (BI). This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to people who follow us on Twitter and read this blog regularly; about three weeks ago, we announced our hiring of Larry Zagata, an established BI guru, as our BI Practice Director.

And today, after months of planning, talking to customers, and pulling everything together, we’re excited to be fully live with our BI practice.

BI is something that we’re hearing about on almost every discovery call we take. Our existing clients are asking about it, and we haven’t found an executive who isn’t blown away by what BI can throw on a dashboard for them. We’re pretty thrilled that we are in a position to parlay our PeopleSoft ERP experience into a BI play, and we’re especially in tune with BI inquiries as a result of our involvement with Workday’s built-in BI functionality.

With software new license revenue forecasted to be down through 2009, organizations have some tough choices to make. They aren’t just hunkering down through the storm, because they still have business goals to hit that IT must enable. Also, for more progressive companies, investment is happening now so they’re sitting pretty when the recovery begins in earnest.

So, today’s mindset isn’t necessarily about new projects begetting new value, but also about how existing IT investments (and data) can help the business run more profitably and efficiently. That’s where BI plays prominently: in helping companies turn existing data into role-appropriate, actionable business information. While that might sound a bit too buzzwordy for some, the truth remains: data is noise without the proper analysis and context. BI provides both.

Our BI practice, which focuses on Oracle BI and SAP Business Objects, is bucketed into three offerings: Knowledge-on-Demand, BI Packaged Services, and Full Lifecycle BI Implementations. Lots of detail included in those links, but you probably still have questions. If BI is of interest to you and you’d like to talk to someone beyond a blog post and a website, contact us and we’ll be in touch right away.

(If you hate web forms, email us at info at miproconsulting dot com.)

Oh, a final plug: if you’re interested in what we stumble across daily (and think is worth talking about), follow MiPro on Twitter. We’re pretty fun – we promise.