Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Performance & Strategy Management

It was again very busy days for last couple of months. To be honest, it was as usual. I had to deliver some trainings in different locations and I had a chance to deliver seminars in SIOUG 2011 and HROUG 2011. I deliver 2 sessions in SIOUG 2011 and they were about OBI 11g. I was invited to HROUG 2011 as a keynote speaker about applications and delivered a session about “Business Automation Features of  Siebel CRM”. Both of the events were really great and I’m very glad to a be a part of these events. In addition, I’ll be delivering 2 sessions in BGOUG 2011. 

As a result I want to share an article about the performance and strategy management feature of Oracle Business Intelligence 11g.

The first object type is the KPI. It is a measurment of business process and compares against a specific goal and it has a trending option which is optional. Also you can create “KPI Watchlists” to have a group of related KPIs and access all the details from a single user interface. 

Here is how a KPI looks like: 

And if you have multiple KPIs which is obvious then you can gain benefit of using KPI watchlists. When you create the KPI watchlist, you’ll be able to define the dimensionility and then add the KPIs that you’re interested:

Another important feature of Oracle Business Intelligence 11g is you have a solution to implement strategy management techniques like Balanced Scorecards.

First you create a Scorecard. 

Then it’s better to define the vision and mission documents by using the Scorecard Documents menu item:

Vision Document: A statement what your organization wants to be in the future. 

Mission Document: A statement specifies the key business goals and priorities that are required to achieve the vision.

In order to manage the defined strategy, you’ll need to understand the performance lenses which are called “Perspectives”. There are 4 different default perspectives. New ones can be also created in the case of requirements. So these are the categories in your organization with which to associate initiatives, objectives and KPIs.

Financial, customer, internal processes and learning & growth are the default perspectives.

Maybe the most important object type in the scorecards is the “Objectives”.  Objectives are desired outcomes of your organization and can be organization based or organized for each department seperately.  KPIs are assigned to them so that you can easily measure its progress. They are created hierarchically. 

To monitor the progress in the scorecards, you can use “Initiatives”. They are time specific tasks like milestones:

There are 3 different types of objects more in order to support the scorecards:

1- Strategy Trees: They are created based on the objectives and helps to navigate to entire strategy in the scorecard and provides supporting information such as owners and KPIs.

2- Strategy Maps: A map shows how the objectives that have been defined for a scorecard area aligned by perspectives and indicates the relationship between the objectives.

3- Cause & Effect Map: It shows the cause & effect relationship between objectives. It helps identifying other objectives that impact the objectives and other objectives that this objective impacts.

Strategy Tree:

Strategy Map:

Cause & Effect Map:

And the big picture of the scorecard:

OBIEE 11g - Creating Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

One of the important new feature is Performance Management objects in the new version of OBIEE 11g. These kind of features were not implemented in the previous version.  I’m going to demonstrate how to create KPI object in OBIEE 11g. 

After you login to OBI, you’ll see create section on the left side. You’ll just click “Create a new KPI” link and it’s going to ask to select the subject area as usual. I use “Sample Sales Lite” subject area in my demo.

There are 4 parts for creating the KPI:

1- General

2- Dimensionality

3-Thresholds

4- Related Documents

In the “General Section” you’ll have to specify the “Business Owner”. Based on the KPI values, you’ll be able to contact with the “Business Owner”.  You must select one measure column for the “Actual Value” and another measure column for the “Target Value”. Just a simple example: Units Ordered and Units Shipped. Another option is “Trending”. If you’ve created a Time dimension in the repository, you’ll gain benefit of trending option. By using this option, you’ll be able to compare periods. 

In the dimensionality page, you’ll select the dimensions and levels that you want to focus on. And if you don’t want to select a value for the member, you just write “Not Pinned”.

In the thresholds page, you specify the threshold values. By default, you can specify only 2 values but it’s customizable. You can create more threshold values and also you can use custom images. 

In the last page named “Related Documents”, you just specify the links for additional documents, web pages or sample reports. This is optional but good have descriptions for the KPI.

Then you’ll save the KPI. 

After you save the KPI in the Presentation Catalog, you have several options to publish the KPI. Here are some examples:

• Pusblish in the dashboard.
• Use in Balanced Scorecard.
• Publish in the KPI watchlists.

As a result I’m going to publish new articles about using KPIs.