Competing on Analytics using OBIEE
On Tuesday I presented a paper entitled Competing on Analytics using OBIEE at the UKOUG BIRT SIG in London. The idea behind the paper was to explore how companies use Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and Analytics, how they can extend their use in an organisation and hence gain competitive advantage from this, and how to use Oracle’s Business Intelligence tools to support this.
<p>If you want to have a look at the paper it is available for download <a href="http://www.rittmanmead.com/files/CompetingOBIEE.pdf">here</a>.</p>
<p>I had an interesting follow-up question: a member of the audience who stated that they had some reports running in Discoverer and wondered what the benefit they could get from upgrading to <span class="caps">OBIEE</span>, they also stated that the organisation they worked for wasn’t looking to advance their analytical prowess as a result of the upgrade.</p>
<p>This was an interesting question for two reasons: first, there are a number of feature advantages of <span class="caps">OBIEE</span> – heterogeneous connectivity, dashboards, guided analysis, alerts to name but a few. However you could also argue that if you are going to keep exactly the same functionality then why make to extra investment to upgrade? Maybe the real issue here, and one point I was trying to put across in the presentation is that the BI landscape is changing.</p>
<p>Traditionally tools such as Discoverer came at a lower cost than <span class="caps">OBIEE</span>, and were often already licensed by an organisation, with the new generation of tools the stakes are raised as the investment is higher. This means that an organisation needs to get a much higher return from their new generation <span class="caps">OBIEE</span> tool. The budget holder may change and the the tool may need to become part of a more enterprise-wide solution, as opposed to a strategic or departmental one – although the positioning of <span class="caps">OBISE1</span> may give you another way. Use of ‘pervasive BI’ is one way this will happen, and will see BI become more deeply integrated into day-to-day business processes.</p>
<p>The second point is how many organisations can honestly say these days they don’t need to maximise their competitive advantage, or at least their performance. Having a unique business is getting harder and harder, the world is becoming smaller. With the government setting the number of targets it now does, (no politic point intended :)) public, educational and health organisations also need to be more analytically engaged.</p>
<p>Overall I think the role of the BI team and BI developer will change, whether you are an employee, contractor or consultant. I think we will need to demonstrate to organisations what can be done with the current set of BI tools, to a degree evangelise and be able to provide the technical backup to inspire organisations to make much better use of Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and Analytics. Hopefully this will result in (a) organisations getting a better return on investment of their BI tools and projects and (b) us (the BI team) having much more interesting projects to work on.</p>