Another new part of OBIEE 11gR1 that you may have seen at the launch
in London, is a new product called Oracle Scorecard and Strategy
Management. It’s delivered as part of the overall OBIEE 11g technology
stack, but like Siebel Marketing before it it’s likely to be separately
licensed and not an automatic part of an OBIEE 10g upgrade. Oracle
Scorecard and Strategy Management had its own breakout sessions at the
product launch, but for those of you who couldn’t attend, how does it
work?
Taking a step back for a moment, another key new feature in OBIEE 11gR1 is support for key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are defined within the web catalog and are defined by taking a measure, a target measure and a set of thresholds, which can then be used either directly in dashboards (by use of another new feature called KPI Watchlists) or within one of the new scorecards. To take an example, say I have a measure for Store Sales, which I want to use along with Store Sales Target to define a KPI. I do this by first selecting these two measures from the BI Server semantic model:
I then define the dimensionality of the KPI, in this instance making
it analyzable by two levels in the store hierarchy, and two in the time
hierarchy.
The values used for these dimensions can either be “pinned”, which
means that they stay static for this KPI, or they can be dynamic, which
allows the user to change them to vary their point of view. In the
example above, I’m using regular “attribute” columns from my semantic
model, but I can also use hierarchical columns as well.
Once the dimensionality is defined, you then set the thresholds. In this example, I’m setting good performance as being within 90% of my threshold, acceptable as being 70% and below that, performance is unacceptable.
Once you’ve set this and a few other options, you then save the KPI
to the web catalog. Then, you can either display the results of the KPI
in a simple table, or you can add them to a KPI Watchlist, which can be
added like any other object to a user’s dashboard. This KPI Watchlist
can then be sliced and diced, using the dimension controls at the top of
the watchlist, to allow the user to drill into whatever level of data
they are authorized to view.
The Scorecard part of OBIEE 11g builds on this foundation of KPIs to
allow you to define complex, multi-part strategies using the metrics in
your semantic layer. In the scorecard below, I’ve taken the four KPIs in
the KPI Watchlist above and organized them into a set of objectives;
one which is financially-focused and aims to improve store monetary
performance, and another which is more stakeholder-focused and uses the
results of satisfaction surveys.
Using these objectives which are organized into a hierarchy of their
own, I can create, for example, a strategy tree diagram that shows me
how each objective feeds into the other. In this case, my overall
objective of improving store performance is made up of my financial, and
non-financial (stakeholder) objectives, each with their own set of
KPIs.
You can set how much influence each objective has on its parent
objective, so that, for example, the non-financial KPIs carry less
weight than the financial ones. In the example above, while store sales
and store margin are good and acceptable respectively, this is
outweighed by the very poor staff satisfaction scores, which overall
contribute to a poor overall store performance score. This is typical of
balanced scorecards, where both financial and non-financial KPIs
contribute to the overall, balanced score for the organization.
You can also define cause and effect maps, showing the relationship between KPIs in a “fishbone”-type of diagram.
If you’re analyzing the scorecard and want to add commentary, there’s
an ability to add annotations to KPIs, and you can also drill-out from
the scorecard into Answers to look at the data in more detail – this is
actually quite a key feature, as it brings together the executive-style
overview of the business with the ability to do more direct access, and
if you combine it with the Action Framework as well (which we’ll cover
in the last posting in this series), you’re getting what Oracle referred
to in the launch as a “closed-loop BI system”.
There’s a lot more to Oracle Strategy and Scorecard, and we’ll have
to wait until the GA release to go through the full details. But it’s
certainly an interesting addition to the Oracle BI product portfolio,
and the introduction of KPIs and other higher-level business metadata
into the OBIEE repository is a welcome move.
Taking a step back for a moment, another key new feature in OBIEE 11gR1 is support for key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are defined within the web catalog and are defined by taking a measure, a target measure and a set of thresholds, which can then be used either directly in dashboards (by use of another new feature called KPI Watchlists) or within one of the new scorecards. To take an example, say I have a measure for Store Sales, which I want to use along with Store Sales Target to define a KPI. I do this by first selecting these two measures from the BI Server semantic model:
Once the dimensionality is defined, you then set the thresholds. In this example, I’m setting good performance as being within 90% of my threshold, acceptable as being 70% and below that, performance is unacceptable.
You can also define cause and effect maps, showing the relationship between KPIs in a “fishbone”-type of diagram.
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