Tag Archives: Oracle
The Importance of BI Documentation
Why Is BI Documentation Important?
Business intelligence systems come with a lot of extra information. Even beautifully constructed analyses have piles of background information and histories. Administrators might often have memos and updates that they’d like share with analysts. Sales figures might have anomalies that need further explanation. But OBIEE does not currently have any options for BI Documentation inside the dashboard.
Let’s say a BI user for a cell phone distribution company is viewing a report comparing the yearly sales figures for several different cell phones. If the analyst notices that one specific cell phone is outperforming the others, but doesn’t know what makes that specific model unique, then they have to go searching for that information.
But what if the individual phone model specifications and advertising and marketing histories were already included as reports inside the dashboard? What if the analyst, with only a couple of clicks, discovered that the reason one cell phone was outperforming the others was due to its next-gen screen, camera, and chip upgrades, which proved popular with consumers? Or what if the analyst discovered that the popular phone, while containing outdated peripherals, was selling so well because a Q3 advertising push for that model only? All of this information might not be contained in the dashboard’s visuals, but greatly affects the analysts’ understanding of the reports.
Current Options for OBIEE Documentation
Some information can be displayed as visuals, but many times this isn’t a practical solution. Besides making dashboards too cluttered, memos, product descriptions, company directories, etc., are not practical as charts and graphs. As of right now, important documentation can be stored in a wide range of places outside of the BI dashboard, but the operating reality at most organizations means that important information is spread across several locations and not always accessible to the people who need it.
Workarounds are inefficient, cost time, cause BI users to leave the BI environment (potentially reducing usage), and increase frustration. If an analyst has to email several different people to locate the information she wants, that complicates her workflow and produces extraneous communications (who likes answering emails?). Before now, there wasn’t an easy solution to these problems.
ChitChat’s BI Documentation Features
With ChitChat, it’s now possible to store critical documentation where it belongs—at the source of the conversation. Keep phone directories, memos from administrators (or requests from analysts to administrators), product descriptions, analytical histories—really, the possibilities are endless—inside the dashboard where they are accessible to the people who need them. Shorten workflows and make life easier for your BI users.
ChitChat’s easy-to-use functionality allows BI users to copy and paste or write (ChitChat has a built-in WYSIWYG text editor) important information inside the BI dashboard, creating a quicker path to insightful and actionable analytics. And isn’t that the goal in the end?
To learn more about ChitChat’s many commentary features, or to request a demo, click here.
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Use OBIEE to Achieve Your GOOOALS!!! – A Presentation for GaOUG
Background
A few months before the start of the 2014 World Cup, Jon Mead, Rittman Mead’s CEO, asked me to come up with a way to showcase our strengths and skills while leveraging the excitement generated by the World Cup. With this in mind, my colleague Pete Tamisin and I decided to create our own game-tracking page for World Cup matches, similar to the ones you see on popular sports websites like ESPN and CBSSports, with one caveat: we would build the game-tracker inside an OBIEE dashboard.
Unfortunately, after several long nights and weekends, we weren’t able to come up with something we were satisfied with, but we learned tons along the way and kept a lot of the content we created for future use. That future use came several months later when we decided to create our own soccer match (“The Rittman Mead Cup”) and build a game-tracking dashboard that would support this match. We then had the pleasure to present our work in a few industry conferences, like the BI Forum in Atlanta and KScope in Hollywood, Florida.
GaOUG Tech Day
Recently I had the privilege of delivering that presentation one last time, at Georgia Oracle Users Group’s Tech Day 2016. With the right amount of silliness (yes, The Rittman Mead cup was played/acted by our own employees), this presentation allowed us to discuss with the audience our approach to designing a “sticky” application; meaning, an application that users and consumers will not only find useful, but also enjoyable, increasing the chances they will return to and use the application.
We live in an era where nice, fun, pretty applications are commonplace, and our audience expects the same from their business applications. Validating the numbers on the dashboard is no longer enough. We need to be able to present that data in an attractive, intuitive, and captivating way. So, throughout the presentation, I discussed with the audience the thoughtful approach we used when designing our game-tracking page. We focused mainly on the following topics: Serving Our Consumers; Making Life Easier for Our Designers, Modelers, and Analysts; and Promoting Process and Collaboration (the latter can be accomplished with our ChitChat application). Our job would have been a lot easier if ChitChat were available when we first put this presentation together….
Finally, you can find the slides for the presentation here. Please add your comments and questions below. There are usually multiple ways of accomplishing the same thing, so I’d be grateful to hear how you guys are creating “stickiness” with your users in your organizations.
Until the next time.
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ChitChat – Commentary Made Simple
Rittman Mead is excited to announce ChitChat, an innovative new communication tool for OBIEE.
Rittman Mead’s clients already receive the best Oracle Business Analytics and Data Integration consulting and training. Now, in a major expansion of our business capabilities, our clients can enjoy the benefits of our engineering team’s innovation and expertise.
As an innovator within the world of Oracle enterprise technologies, Rittman Mead sought to design a solution to the lack of commentary features within the business intelligence dashboard. After much work, our best and brightest software engineers developed ChitChat to transform the way you do BI.
ChitChat is a multi-tiered platform that creates a collaborative and dynamic environment for discussion. ChitChat enhances BI capabilities by bringing commenting and documentation functions into the dashboard, increasing ease-of-use and seamlessly integrating with current workflows.
Focus discussion with versatile commenting. Store critical information at the source. Enhance the BI experience. Seamlessly integrate.
Rely on Rittman Mead to get the most out of your business intelligence investments.
To learn more about ChitChat, or to request a demo, click here.
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Oracle BICS Basics: Creating a Project
In this post I would simply like to take you through making art out of your favorite data set. Using the immense technology behind Oracle Data Visualizer on the Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service (BICS) we will go through uploading a spreadsheet and creating art with it. The process is so simple it would allow […]
The post Oracle BICS Basics: Creating a Project appeared first on Art of Business Intelligence Blog.
The Importance of BI Commentary
Why is Commentary Important?
We communicate every day. Communication through text is especially abundant with the proliferation of new on-demand technologies. Have you gone through your emails today? Have you read the news, weather, or blogs (like this one)? Communication is the backbone to every interpersonal interaction. Without it, we are left guessing and assuming.
BI implementations are no exception when it comes to communication’s importance, and I would argue communication is a major component of every BI environment. The goal of any BI application is to discover and expose actionable information from data, but without collaboration, discovering insights becomes difficult. By allowing users to collaborate immediately in the BI application, new insights can be discovered quicker.
Any BI conversation should maintain its own dedicated communication channel, and the optimal place for these conversations is as close to the information-consumption phase as possible. By allowing users to collaborate in discussions over results at the same location as the data, users will be empowered to extract as much information as possible.
Unfortunately, commentary support is absent from OBIEE.
The Current OBIEE Communication Model
The lack of commentary support does not stop the community from developing their own methods or approaches to communicating within their BI environments. Right now, common approaches include purchasing pre-developed software, engineering custom solutions, or forcing the conversations into other channels.
Purchasing a commentary application or developing your own internal solutions expedites the user communication process. However, what about those who do not find a solution, and instead decide to use a “work-around” approach?
Choosing to ignore the missing functionality is the cheapest approach, initially, but may actually cost more in the long run. To engage in simple conversations, users are required to leave the BI dashboard, which adds time and difficulty to their daily processes. And reiterating the context of a conversation is both time consuming and error prone.
Additionally, which communication channel will the BI conversations invade? A dedicated communication channel, built specifically to easily display and relay the BI topics of interest, is the most efficient, and beneficial, solution.
How ChitChat Can Help
ChitChat provides a channel of communication directly within the BI environment, allowing users to engage in conversations as close to the data consumption phase as possible. Users will never be required to leave the BI application to engage in a conversation about the data, and they won’t need to reiterate the environment through screenshots or descriptions.
Recognizing the importance of separate channels of communication, ChitChat also easily allows each channel to maintain their respective scopes. For instance, a user may discover an error on a BI dashboard. Rather than simply identifying the error in the BI environment, the user can export the comment to Atlassian JIRA and create a ticket for the issue to be resolved, thus maintaining the appropriate scopes of both JIRA and ChitChat. Integrations allow existing channels of communication to maintain their respective importance, and appropriately restrict the scope of conversations.
ChitChat is placed in the most opportune location for BI commentary, while maintaining the correct scope of the conversation. Other approaches often ignore one of these two aspects of BI commentary, but both are required to efficiently support a community within a BI environment. The most effective solution is not one that simply solves the problem, or meets some of the criteria, but the solution that meets all of the requirements.
Commentary Made Simple
Conversation around a BI environment will always occur, regardless of the supporting infrastructure or difficulty in doing so. Rather than forcing users to spend time working around common obstacles or developing their own solutions, investing in an embedded application will save both time and money. These offerings will not only meet the basic requirements, but also ensure the best experience for users, and the most return on investment.
Providing users the exact features they need, where they need it, is one step in nurturing a healthy BI environment, and ChitChat is an excellent solution to meet these criteria.
To find out more about ChitChat, or to request a demo, click here!
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