Event invitation: Oracle Business Intelligence Online Forum on December 15th 9:00-12:30 PST

Join us for the Oracle Business Intelligence Forum on Wednesday, December 15th at 9:00am (PST) where Oracle executives, customers, and industry analyst, Howard Dresner, come together to share what Business Intelligence can do for your business. Product experts will be available to chat live throughout the event.
Click here to register.

Closing the gap between strategy and execution with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

Wikipedia defines strategy as a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. An example of this is General Electric’s acquisitions and divestiture strategy (plan) designed to propel GE to number 1 or 2 place (goal) in every business segment that it operated in. Execution on the other hand can be defined as the actions taken to getting things done. In GE’s case execution will be steps followed for mergers/acquisitions or divestiture. Business press has written extensively about the importance of both strategy and execution in achieving desired business objectives. Perhaps the quote from Thomas Edison says it best – “vision without execution is hallucination”. Conversely, it can be said that “execution without vision” is well may be “wishful thinking”.

Research overwhelmingly point towards the wide gap between strategy and execution. According to a published study, 49% of surveyed executives perceive a gap between their organizations’ ability to develop and communicate sound strategies and their ability to implement those strategies. Further, of these respondents, 64% don’t have full confidence that their companies will be able to close the gap.

Having established the severity and importance of the problem let’s talk about the reasons for the strategy-execution gap. The common reasons include:

–        Lack of clearly defined goals

–        Lack of consistent measure of success

–        Lack of ownership

–        Lack of alignment

–        Lack of communication

–        Lack of proper execution

–        Lack of monitoring

There are multiple approaches to solving the problem including organizational development practices, technology enablement etc. In most cases a combination of approaches is required to achieve the desired result. For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll focus on technology. 

Imagine an integrated closed loop technology platform that automates the entire management cycle from defining strategy to assigning ownership to communicating goals to achieving alignment to collaboration to taking actions to monitoring progress and achieving mid course corrections. Besides, for best ROI and lowest TCO such a system should also have characteristics like:

•  Complete

–        Full functionality

–        Rich end user access

• Open

–        Any data source

–        Any business application

–        Any technology stack

•  Integrated

–        Common metadata

–        Common security

–        Common system management

From a capabilities perspective the system should provide the following capabilities:

• Define

–        Strategy

–        Objectives

–        Ownership

–        KPI’s

• Communicate

–        Pervasive

–        Collaborative

–        Role based

–        Secure

• Execute

–        Integrated

–        Intuitive

–        Secure

–        Ubiquitous

• Monitor

–        Multiple styles and formats

–        Exception based

–        Push & Pull

Having talked about the business problem and outlined the blueprint for a technology solution, let’s talk about how Oracle Business Intelligence 11g can help. Oracle Business Intelligence is a comprehensive business intelligence solution for reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards and scorecards. Oracle’s best in class BI platform is based on an architecturally integrated technology foundation that provides a unified end user experience and features a Common Enterprise Information Model, with common security, query request generation and optimization, and system management. The BI platform is

·         Complete – meaning it delivers all modes and styles of BI including reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards and scorecards with a rich end user experience that includes visualization, collaboration, alerts and notifications, search and mobile access.

·         Open – meaning the BI platform integrates with any data source, ETL tool, business application, application server, security infrastructure, portal technology as well as any ODBC compliant third party analytical tool. The suite accesses data from multiple heterogeneous sources—including popular relational and multidimensional data sources and major ERP and CRM applications from Oracle and SAP.

·         Integrated – meaning the BI platform is based on an architecturally integrated technology foundation built on an open, standards based service oriented architecture.  The platform features a common enterprise information model, common security model and a common configuration, deployment and systems management framework.

To summarize, Oracle Business Intelligence is a comprehensive, integrated BI platform that lets you define strategy, identify objectives, assign ownership, define KPI’s, collaborate, take action, monitor, report and do course corrections all form a single interface and a single system. The platform’s integrated metadata model and task based design ensures that the entire workflow from defining strategy to execution to monitoring is completely integrated delivering end to end visibility, transparency and agility. Click here to learn more about Oracle BI 11g. 

Cloud ready business intelligence with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

Business Intelligence (BI) on the cloud represents the coming together of two key information technology (IT) trends – evolution of the cloud computing architecture as a cost effective, quick and efficient computing platform and use of business intelligence technology to reduce cost, gain insight and improve the quality and speed of business decisions.  Leading analyst firms like Gartner and IDC are predicting high adoption rates for applications deployed on private and public clouds.

Oracle is committed to delivering hardware and software solutions that are complete, open and integrated. Cloud computing is driving a significant part of Oracle’s product development plans – from enterprise applications to middleware, business intelligence technology, databases, servers and storage devices, as well as cloud management systems. Taken together, these developments are building off Oracle’s decade long leadership in underlying technologies like grid computing, clustering, server virtualization and dynamic provisioning, SOA, identity management and large scale management automation.

Oracle is committed to delivering business intelligence solutions that can be deployed both on the cloud and non-cloud mode.  Oracle Business Intelligence 11g, Oracle’s market leading BI platform has been architected to support both cloud and non-cloud deployments. A web services based SOA architecture along with full BI functionality and high scalability and manageability makes Oracle BI 11g suitable for cloud type deployment.

I recently authored a whitepaper that provides an overview of cloud computing along with Oracle’s cloud computing strategy and significant features of Oracle BI 11g that make it well suited for cloud deployments. The whitepaper also presents examples of customers who have deployed Oracle BI on the cloud.

The whitepaper is available here. Registration is free so please register to download and let me know of your thoughts.

Business Analytics – The holy grail of running a successful business

Running a successful business is all about taking better and timely decisions. How can you improve the quality and speed of decision making? There are two ways. First you can rely on your gut or experience and be right 1 out of 10 times. Second you can analyze the huge volumes of data available to you and answer questions like – what is going on? Why are things the way they are? How can I improve performance? The odds in this case are being right 9 out of 10 times. Any reasonable, analytical person will choose the latter option unless you rely on your gut to take decisionsJ. Isn’t this what is taught at the business schools worldwide – Taking better decisions based on insights drawn from using analytical tools. So, in support of the title of this blog – running a successful business is all about taking better decisions and analytics can help you take better decisions hence analytics is the holy grail of running a successful business.

Now, what exactly is business analytics? Business Analytics answers a broad range of questions from what is going on in my business? To why are things the way they are? To how can I achieve desired business results? From a capability perspective analytics include broad capabilities from reporting which answers what is going on to ad-hoc query, statistical analysis, data mining which answer why are things the way they are to scorecards, budgeting, planning and financial analytics which answer how can I achieve desired results.  Sounds complex – no it’s not provided you take a balanced approach. Start small with something easy like reporting and grow and mature your analytical capabilities over time. Of course the trick here is to choose an analytical platform the various components of which fit together as Lego blocks.

This is where Oracle’s business analytics solutions can help. From BI Publisher for reporting to Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition for query, reporting and analysis to Oracle Essbase for OLAP, scenario modeling and forecasting to Oracle Real Time Decisions for real time decision management to Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management for defining, communicating and measuring business objectives to Oracle database’s data mining and analytics capabilities to Oracle Exadata – Oracle’s database and data warehouse appliance with hardware and software engineered to work together, Oracle offers a complete portfolio of capabilities for end to end analytics. A tight metadata integration across the entire portfolio combined with scalability, reliability and manageability ensures that the platform delivers the best ROI for lowest TCO.

Net net, Oracle’s modular, Lego block like analytics platform can help you start small and grow as business grows to achieve the holy grail of running a successful business.