New Oracle Page talks to Solutions for Addressing American Recovery Act BI and Other Needs

Larry.Baugh — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:16:58 +0000

At Collaborate, I learned about some interesting new collateral that Oracle has put together around the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that I thought I’d pass on. Oracle has compiled this at http://www.oracle.com/goto/arra. I haven’t had the chance to review it all yet, but there is a lengthy white-paper, a recorded Web-Conference and other info anyone can browse. The solutions illustrate how the OBIEE infrastructure and technology can be leveraged to provide a dashboard such as below and other BI capabilities. Other tools/solutions to help are also addressed. While this stuff is certainly not “Out of the Box” and would definitely require a good amount of work (assuming the source data is available to support this kind of analysis), I found it an interesting example of how the OBIEE infrastructure can be leveraged to provide key dashboards and info for this relevant topic to help keep senior executives, Congress and others happy. Note: this is not part of the Oracle BI Apps Federal Financials offering just announced, so if you’re an E-Business Suite customer thinking this would be a snap to implement, not exactly. But certainly a lot of E-Business Suite data could be leveraged to support this type of dashboard reporting.

Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6 Released: Includes Oracle Federal Financials Analytics

Larry.Baugh — Fri, 01 May 2009 22:26:59 +0000

We’ve been hearing about the canned Federal Financials OBIEE analytics capability for some time, and now it has been released. From an initial look, it looks like this initial Federal-specific batch of canned offerings includes 2 Dashboards, one focused on various Federal Balance Sheet metrics and the other focused on Federal Budget & Spending. Of course there are plenty of dashboards, metrics and reports in the standard Financial Analytics offering that are useful in Federal Financial management as well. At a first glance, it looks like these new Federal pieces are just using an 11i10 adapter and not R12, so we’ll have to look further into that.

A good initial summary of this latest release is available in this Oracle BI Blog Post. A bit more detail can be extracted from the BI Apps 7.9.6 Licensing and Packaging Guide here. Note, a bunch of the documentation links for this new release aren’t working yet, but I’m sure they’ll get that straightened out before too long.

For those not yet too familiar with OBIEE and BI Apps, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE), formerly known as Siebel Analytics, is the premier Business Intelligence framework/infrastructure that Oracle is pitching these days. A starting point for learning more is the main Oracle BI page here. As with any framework, the content is what makes the tools valuable. BI Apps provide a significant amount of “Out of the Box” content for OBIEE customers using Oracle EBS, Peoplesoft, JDE, etc. While OBIEE can provide direct insight into the production data, its primarily architecture is really that of a data warehouse which takes data from one or more sources and transforms it into different physical and logical data models through an ETL process, then provides some really slick reporting capabilities for analyzing the logical data. The BI Apps offerings are packages of canned ETL mappings and canned reports/analytics/dashboards that Oracle provides. These canned mappings are based on source data from Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards software and some universal adapters. So basically, an Oracle 11i10 Federal Financials customer doesn’t have to start building ETL from scratch. The BI Apps provide a significant amount of “Out of the Box” capability and Oracle promises to maintain this capability as the underlying Enterprise Apps evolve. Of course, any customer can leverage the OBIEE infrastructure to supplement the BI Apps reports provided.

Oracle Federal Applications » OBIEE

New Oracle Page talks to Solutions for Addressing American Recovery Act BI and Other Needs

Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6 Released: Includes Oracle Federal Financials Analytics