Hi All,
As you might be aware Oracle had released the new OBIEE 11g, most of the customers are asking what are the new features in this release. I will try to highlight some of the critical features that makes this release amazing and being called “worth waiting”.
There are many features in this new release but mainly I will focus on the features that I found many of my customers were asking for and/or most of the times caused us to do heavy technical customizations.
Scorecard
For those of you who had been working on OBIEE 10G are aware of this issue that 10G don’t come with the ability to create your own balance scorecard, in fact there is no balance scorecard in 10G. So in my opinion, one of the most critical feature in this release is new integrated Scorecard and Strategy Management module which allow organizations to map strategies to objectives and to track performance via real-time Key Performance Indicators.
Before this release customers used to have Hyperion balance scorecard (HBSC) or any other BSC application along with OBIEE 10G to compensate this missing feature in OBIEE 10G; the problem we always faced, is that our customers wanted to integrate HBSC with OBIEE to be able to drill down from their objectives/goals to the associated KPI(s) that affect this Objective/goal/initiative. Such integration was very costly and rigid, especially If you have a new strategic objective that you want to relate to one or more KPI in OBIEE.
With this new feature business users will be able to create their own BSC and associate KPIs to their goals. More interestingly, BI APPS that come on top of OBIEE with set of KPIs, dashboards and reports related to Oracle eBusiness suite can now be tightly integrated with the new BSC feature in OBIEE 11G. As per the new release this will work only with BIAPPs R7.9.6.x or later and with Oracle eBusiness suite R11.5.x or later.
This feature had closed one major gap that often caused the customer to look for another products.
Watchlist
In this new feature you can create KPI watchlist to monitor the performance of KPIs that may not have been created in Oracle Scorecard, so you can measure the progress of strategic objectives or initiatives. Also, watchlist can be be used to group/categories your KPIs so you can easily track and maintain them. It is worth mentioning that , you can assign any number of KPIs to the watch list and you can have multiple watchlists within you catalog.
The nice thing about this feature is that you can see at glance the data related for each KPI in the watchlist. This includes:
• Current status
• Trend status indicating if performance has increased, decreased, or remained the same, and if any changes are desirable
• Current and target values
• Variance value and percent by which the current value deviates from the target.
• Change value and percent identify how much the current value differs from that from the previous period
Strategy Map
Strategy maps provide an alternate view that you can view hierarchies of strategic objectives that are required to achieve your organization strategy. The creation of the strategy map for an organization is the key first step in the balanced scorecard methodology. It involves a clear definition of business strategies and is typically achieved after a number of highly intensive brainstorming sessions in which key business heads representing all functions and processes are required to participate.
With strategy map, you can
• Connect strategic objectives with other objectives, lower-level child objectives, or objectives from other Strategy Trees.
• Indicate dependencies and correlations between objectives. These objectives will display on the Cause and Effect map.
In OBIEE 11G Strategy maps display the following information for strategic objectives or KPIs where appropriate:
• Overall performance state indicated by the symbols used to represent performance.
• Performance trend, indicating if performance has improved, remained the same, or declined
• Actual value as a number and percent
• Trend graphs depicting previous performance levels
Cause and Effect Map
Cause and Effect map gives you the ability to understand cause-and-effect relationships between scorecard metrics and objectives. For example: Does an increase in sales commission affect the organization's profitability? Cause-and-effect diagrams can help drive organizational alignment be showing how lower-level KPIs impact strategic objectives.
Cause and Effect map has the same look and feel of Fishbone Diagrams, because a completed diagram can look like the skeleton of a fish or Ishikawa diagrams.
