Where You Are Now

OBIEE 12c has been out for some time, and it seems like most folks are delaying upgrading to OBIEE 12c until the very last minute. Or at least until Oracle decides to put out another major version change of OBIEE, which is understandable. You’ve already spent time and money and devoted hundreds of resource hours to system monitoring, maintenance, testing, and development. Maybe you’ve invested in staff training to try to maximize your ROI in your existing OBIEE purchase. And now, after all this time and effort, you and your team have finally gotten things just right. Your BI engine is humming along, user adoption and stickiness are up, and you don’t have a lot of dead objects clogging up the Web Catalog. Your report hacks and work-arounds have been worked and reworked to become sustainable and maintainable business solutions. Everyone is getting what they want.

Sure, this scenario is part fantasy, but it doesn’t mean that as a BI team lead or member, you’re not always working toward this end. It would be nice to think that the people designing the tools with which we do this work understood the daily challenges and processes we must undergo in order to maintain the precarious homeostasis of our BI ecosystems. That’s where Rittman Mead comes in. If you’re considering upgrading to OBIEE 12c, or are even curious, keep reading. We’re here to help.

So Why Upgrade

Let’s get right down to it. Shoot over here and here to check out what our very own Mark Rittman had to say about the good, the bad, and the ugly of 12c. Our Silvia Rauton did a piece on lots of the nuts and bolts of 12c’s new front-end features. They’re all worth a read. Upgrading to OBIEE 12c offers many exciting new features that shouldn’t be ignored.

How Rittman Mead Can Help

We understand what it is to be presented with so many project challenges. Do you really want to risk the potential perils and pitfalls presented by upgrading to OBIEE 12c? We work both harder and smarter to make this stuff look good. And we get the most out of strategy and delivery via a number of in-house tools designed to keep your OBIEE deployment in tip top shape.

Maybe you want to make sure all your Catalog and RPD content gets ported over without issue? Instead of spending hours on testing every dashboard, report, and other catalog content post-migration, we’ve got the Automated Regression Testing package in our tool belt. We deploy this series of proprietary scripts and dashboards to ensure that everything will work just the way it was, if not better, from one version to the next.

Maybe you’d like to make sure your system will fire on all cylinders or you’d like to proactively monitor your OBIEE implementation. For that we’ve got the Performance Analytics Dashboards, built on the open source ELK stack to give you live, active monitoring of critical BI system stats and the underlying database and OS.

On top of these tools, we’ve got the strategies and processes in place to not only guarantee the success of your upgrade, but to ensure that you and your team remain active and involved in the process.

What to Expect

You might be wondering what kinds of issues you can expect to experience during upgrading to OBIEE 12c (which is to say, nothing’s going to break, right?). Are you going to have to go through a big training curve? Does upgrading to OBIEE 12c mean you’re going to experience considerable resource downtime as your team, or an even an outside company, manages this process? To answer this question, I’m reminded of a quote from the movie Fight Club: “Choose your level of involvement.”

While we always prefer to work alongside your BI or IT team to facilitate the upgrade process, we also know that resource time is valuable and that your crew can’t stop what they’re doing until things wraps up. We often find that the more clients are engaged with the process, however, the easier the hand-off is because clients better understand best practices, and IT and BI teams are more empowered for the future.

Learning More about OBIEE 12c

But if you’re like many organizations, maybe you have to stay more hands off and get training after the upgrade is complete. Check out the link here to look over the agenda of our OBIEE 12c Bootcamp training course. Like our hugely popular 11g course, this program is five days of back-to-front instruction taught via a selection of seminars and hands-on labs, designed to impart most everything your team will need to know to continue or begin their successful BI practice.

What we often find is that, in addition to being a thorough and informative course, the Bootcamp is a great way to bring together teams or team members, often dispersed among different offices, under one roof to gain common understanding about how each person plays an important role as a member of the BI process. Whether they handle the ETL, data modeling, or report development, everyone can benefit from what often evolves from a training session into some impromptu team building.

Feel Empowered

If you’re still on the fence about whether or not to upgrade, as I said before, you’re not alone. There are lots of things you need to consider, and rightfully so. You might be thinking, “What does this mean for extra work on the plates of my resources? How can I ensure the success of my project? Is it worth it to do it now, or should I wait for the next release?” Whatever you may be mulling over, we’ve been there, know how to answer the questions, and have some neat tools in our utility belt to move the process along. In the end, I hope to have presented you with some bits to aid you in making a decision about upgrading to OBIEE 12c, or at least the impetus to start thinking about it.

If you’d like any more information or just want to talk more about the ins and outs of what an upgrade might entail, send over an email or give us a call.

The post Contemplating Upgrading to OBIEE 12c? appeared first on Rittman Mead Consulting.