Dashboards, Reporting & Business Intelligence

Your business intelligence software will only ever be as good as your company’s attitude towards it. Here are a few ways that businesses end up sabotaging their own business intelligence initiatives:

• Unrealistic Expectations – Believing that just because the software has been paid for that you’ll have compliance to this new system across the board is, unfortunately, not enough. Before the software system is purchased, it is important that a core group be designated to lead the initiative and help achieve compliance. This group will be responsible for orchestrating the rollout of the business intelligence software and maintaining it moving forward, as well as eliminating any old systems of data collection that could cause duplication.
• Limiting Access to Results – In companies that allow limited access to reports, the sales team, marketing department, and other key teams and groups are left out of the loop and the business intelligence software is not used to its full potential. While business intelligence reports are very important during the decision making process at the corporate level, they can also help guide the teams that have the most face time with your customers, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and retention.
• Poor Data Quality – If the data your program is using is poor then the results it produces will be unreliable, no matter how excellent the business intelligence software is out of the box. No one will end up using the information during the decision making process or while interacting with customers after being burned by shoddy results. The initiative will crumble before it gets off the ground. By entrusting the core group with data quality, you can follow through with your program knowing that poor existing data will be cleaned up and that new data coming in will be quality from the get go.
• Resistance to Change – Business intelligence doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When you choose your business intelligence software, you need to find a vendor who can help you pick a product that can adapt to changing variables or that can support additional applications as time goes on. Both your customers and your employees will probably have some suggestions for how to improve your system within the first couple of months or even weeks of its launch, so you must be ready and willing to change your business intelligence program.
• Winging It – Without a clearly defined set of variables and objectives, any company will have a hard time finding value in their business intelligence software. The core group should be aware of what your company’s goals are and what will be the key milestones towards those goals. They should also know exactly what constitutes revenue and the specifics of other important variables when they process incoming data. With a clear view of what the business intelligence initiative was expected to accomplish, they will be able to help the system provide useful business intelligence for the entire company.

This is a quick announcement. I am scheduled for presentation on OBIEE and GL Reporting.

This is the same presentation that was accepted last year (2008) at OAUG with title “GL reporting on steroids using Discoverer and OBIEE” but unfortunately due to client commitment I couldn’t make it.

This presentation is about how to make use of GL chart of account hierarchies in OBIEE. Since OBIEE is the de-facto BI app from Oracle the presentation will focus on building GL hierarchies in the repository. The same can be accomplished using Discoverer.

I will make the presentation available when its ready

There’s no escaping it: these are tough economic times. Everywhere you go you hear about how bad the economy is doing, whether it’s news about the stock market, another major company in trouble, or the credit crisis. Making your business successful in times like these may sound like a daunting task, but with the help of business intelligence software, your company can still thrive.

The success of your business in any economy relies on a lot more than some data and statistics, but what you do with that data can greatly improve your company. The performance of your company is only as good as the performance of your projects, so having the data to analyze the performance and management of your projects is essential. Business intelligence software allows you to track the performance of your projects and make decisions for your company that will improve both the day-to-day tasks and the overall organization of the company. With the right information, you can make your projects and your company more efficient, focused, and successful, regardless of the economy.

For some companies, being able to see the relationship between differing sets of data is just as important as the data itself. As business intelligence software continues to improve, the ability to analyze those data relationships is also improving. Using business intelligence to understand the complete picture, rather than just the separate pieces, is another tool to stay competitive in a tough economy and keep your business on the path to success.

All of that data isn’t very useful if the software interface isn’t very functional. Many business intelligence software companies are now offering Rich Internet Applications to improve that functionality. Features of such software often include web dashboards, interactive web reports, and the ability to automatically generate spreadsheets that everyone is familiar with.

Don’t let a volatile economy affect the success of your company. Business intelligence software is a key element to guiding your business through the coming months and years, improving performance, and keeping your company focused.

Connection Pool is a very interesting concept in OBIEE. If you are from Discoverer background then you never had to deal with it at the Oracle Discoverer Administrator level. There are java connection pool settings which is different and application server connection pools but these are the settings which are configured by the DBAs.

Even in OBIEE, it is recommended that DBAs have their input in deciding the connection pool settings

The connection pool is an object in the Physical layer that describes access to the data source. It contains information about the connection between the Oracle BI Server and that data source.

The Physical layer in the Administration Tool contains at least one connection pool for each database. When you create the physical layer by importing a schema for a data source, the connection pool is created automatically. You can configure multiple connection pools for a database. Connection pools allow multiple concurrent data source requests (queries) to share a single database connection, reducing the overhead of connecting to a database.

For each connection pool, you must specify the maximum number of concurrent connections allowed. After this limit is reached, the Oracle BI Server routes all other connection requests to another connection pool or, if no other connection pools exist, the connection request waits until a connection becomes available.

Increasing the allowed number of concurrent connections can potentially increase the load on the underlying database accessed by the connection pool. Test and consult with your DBA to make sure the data source can handle the number of connections specified in the connection pool. Also, if the data sources have a charge back system based on the number of connections, you might want to limit the number of concurrent connections to keep the charge-back costs down.

In addition to the potential load and costs associated with the database resources, the Oracle BI Server allocates shared memory for each connection upon server startup. This raises the number of connections and increases Oracle BI Server memory usage

Recently while installing OBIEE on one of our training PCs, we ran into the following error.

Unable to connect
SQLState=IM003
Specified driver could not be loaded due to system error 998 (Oracle in OraDb10g_home1)

This error occured at the time of setting up the ODBC connection. After some research the fix was to just change your enviornment PATH setting.

It seems that the OBIEE installation changed the PATH string by placing the new oralcebi home as the first path in the string. This annoyed its elder brother which already resided at the old oracle home and contained the 10g database. The ODBC dll (sqora32.dll) resides in the database home so it couldn’t find it when the path was changed by OBIEE installation. So the fix is to update the PATH string and place the Oracle database home as the first entry in the string.

As you see, the c:\oracle\product\10.2.0\db_1\bin is now moved to the front, ahead of the f:\oraclebi (this is where OBIEE is installed)

Using the business intelligence programs that you are already familiar with to extract useful information from customer interactions can turn out to be difficult. Most business intelligence analytics like OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) and data warehousing function very well when dealing with structured data, but when faced with unstructured data like customer comments these tools are not helpful in and of themselves. The question is how to make customer comments, whether collected through surveys, customer service calls, comment cards, or other means, assessable to these tools. These comments can include information on everything from performance to service quality to cost to reliability. The key is to organize the unstructured data.

In order to structure this data, a few questions have to be addressed:

• What kind of information is your company looking for in the comments?
• What categories should the comments be broken down into?
• What kinds of terms are important to categorize these comments?

The types of categories for a comment can usually be broken down into complaints, either about the product, delivery, shipment, and/or cost; questions about the product, delivery, or billing; compliments about the product or service; and suggestions for how to improve service. Using techniques for text mining, you can find the most important terms and phrases in the comments to add a new level of analysis to your current business intelligence findings. This process will find the names of products or people, dates, times, and monetary amounts. There is a variety of entity extraction tools on the market, including a number of open source versions that can be starting points for your company to build a custom version.

Nouns, verbs, and adjectives will all be identified and can be used to identify the type of comment and its tone. The comment can then be categorized and the unstructured data begins to take on a structure that can be analyzed by your business intelligence program. Using fixed categorization, the comments can be used in existing structured data elements in mining and statistic analysis.

Since the words and terms will vary from customer to customer and region to region, the different versions of the same concept will have to be recognized as one and the same and processed as such by the tools that you use. The same applies to semantic rules. Once you find a text mining technique that can deliver the structured information that your company can use to make strong decisions based on business intelligence you can rest assured that the information you have from your customers could be used to enhance your business.

Finding the focus of your business and monitoring your success in that particular area is the key to success in today’s diverse market. You can monitor how well your company is maintaining strategic focus by defining your Key Performance Indicators and investing in a business intelligence software program that will help you keep track of your progress. Your Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, can show you which areas you’re executing well and which need improvement.

Choosing Your KPIs

Depending on your business’ focus, your KPIs will be different. Once you narrow down which KPIs are important to your business you can set up your business intelligence software to start collecting the necessary data you need to keep track of your strategy.

· Cost-focused Businesses – The KPIs for cost-focused businesses include cost measurement, cycle time, ability to conform to market standards, quantity, and quality.

· Product-focused Businesses – You’ll be looking at new products in the pipeline, research and development, time to market, and product customization when you select your KPIs for a product-focused business.

· Customer-focused Businesses – Your KPIs will be knowledge of customers, environmental appearance, complaint management, employee empathy, product expertise, and responsiveness in a customer-focused business.

A cost-focused business might benefit from having some knowledge of its customers, but it is not an important KPI for the company overall, while the opposite is true for a customer-focused business. You can mix and match these KPIs if you find it necessary, but most of the time this categorization will hold true.

Setting Up Your Business Intelligence Software

Armed with KPIs specific to your business, you can set up your business intelligence software to collect the data that will show whether or not you are on track with your company strategy. For cost-focused businesses, you will need to collect data that shows cost for the entire process, from materials to labor. Product-focused businesses will need to collect data that shows how the company is moving forward with new products and customer-focused businesses will have to collect more information on customer satisfaction. This will require the business intelligence program to mine different data sources, depending on the information required.

It may even be useful for you to determine your KPIs before you purchase your business intelligence software. That way, you’ll be able to purchase the best package for your data tracking requirements knowing what you need to collect.

Data problems can severely affect the quality of your business intelligence analysis, but they are often hard to detect. Because they don’t stop your analysis process right away, they can slowly become more and more of a detriment until they finally destroy your BI project. Because of how destructive unreliable data can be, one of the most important things you can do to ensure that your business intelligence software runs correctly is to make sure that your data is easily accessible and accurate. If you have duplicate or incomplete information, you will end up with results and eventually initiatives that are baseless. If you use the information to reach out to your customers for marketing campaigns or up-selling opportunities, you run the risk of looking disorganized and incompetent.

You can fix your data problems by following these basic steps:

• Detect and correct potential issues before they do any damage. Before adding any raw data to your business intelligence software applications, use reconnaissance software tools to determine the quality and reliability of your new data. This software is usually more accurate than checking the data manually and can detect and correct mistakes before they get lost in your existing data.
• Eliminate duplicates and standardize all your data as it comes in. This will give you a more comprehensive view of what kind of data you are actually collecting from the get go. By establishing procedures for data processing as it comes in, you can standardize the data as it enters the system.
• Make sure that any new data that applies to and affects old data can be categorized with the older data to create a more complete information history on a specific topic, be it customer buying habits or updating ROI.
• Set up a data “dictionary” so that data from separate sources with different phrases that share the same meaning are identified as belonging to the same category. For example, “manager” and “mgr” are spelled differently, but share the same meaning and should be treated as such.
• Use the tools available to you to automatically extract data from different sources, interpret it, and transform it into a form that can be used by your business intelligence software. This will save you the time and money required to translate your data manually.

Once you know your data is in the right format and contains information that can be used successfully by your software, you can concentrate on the results of your business intelligence analysis and how they affect your company. Take a second look at how reliable your data is now, before the wrong information affects your investment in your BI program.

Companies large and small can benefit from a well thought out business intelligence strategy, but developing that strategy can sometimes be more challenging than implementing a business intelligence program.  To make sure that your company is getting the most out of your BI program, make sure that you define your goals and have a plan for the information you generate before you start collecting and analyzing data. 

First Steps

Assess your current system of data collection.  How you collect your data will make a difference in how complete your information is, which will in turn affect the results of your business intelligence program.   Make sure that if you need historical data on your company or customers that you know where it is and how to access it.  You’ll also need to take some time to understand your business needs and make a rough road map for how you would like your business to transform.  Focus your attention on a few operational objective that can be achieved both short and long term.

Planning Your Strategy

Start with your vision of where you would like your company to be in 3 to 5 years.  Pick specific goals that can be achieved with the assistance of a good business intelligence program.  These goals should have measurable success rates or key performance indicators.  You will use your key performance indicators (KPIs) as milestones for how close you are to accomplishing your goals.  You can then set up your information infrastructure to collect the necessary data that can be analyzed and turned into information, which can be used to make effective decisions for your company. 

In order to pick the most worthwhile goals, you must understand what the desired end result is.  You will have to ask yourself what you will do with the business intelligence information your program generates once you have it.  Otherwise, you will have a vast amount of information and no way to strategize around it.  In companies without a comprehensive long-term plan, decision makers react to the information they get from their data without understanding the far-reaching consequences of their actions. 

Another important thing to think about before you implement your program is what your options are once you have the information.  Often companies have an idea of how they want to move forward and are looking to the business intelligence information generated by their BI program to support their current strategy.  They soon learn that the information is not always in line with their current plan.  Brainstorm all possible outcomes of your business intelligence program and think of ways that your company can improve based on the different results.  You probably won’t be able to come up with every single possibility, but you will be prepared to think creatively when your BI program starts to generate useful information.

Lastly, remember why you are implementing this program.  Business intelligence can be a huge asset to your business, but if you focus on the data and not on what the data can do for your company, your energy is misplaced.  Before you become overwhelmed with data warehousing and data integration initiatives, take a step back and refocus on your company’s goals.