04.19.08
Posted in Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise/Corporate Performance Management (EPM/CPM), Oracle OBIEE at 3:12 pm by irusgroup
Our OBIEE clients ask us to define business intelligence (BI) all the time. Here are some good definitions we found after a quick search.
a popularized, umbrella term used to describe a set of concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support …
www.noisebetweenstations.com/personal/essays/metadata_glossary/metadata_glossary.html
Normally describes the result of in-depth analysis of detailed business data. Includes database and application technologies, as well as analysis practices. …
it.csumb.edu/departments/data/glossary.html
Systems that provide directed background data and reporting tools to support and improve the decision-making process.
bridgefieldgroup.com/bridgefieldgroup/glos1.htm
The capability to perform in-depth analysis and possibly data mining, of detailed business data, providing real and significant information to business users. Business intelligence usually makes use of tools designed to easily access data warehouse data.
www.damacoc.org/presentations/2007_04_11_Adelman_DWGlossary.doc
The knowledge derived from analyzing an organization’s information.
planning.ucsc.edu/irps/dwh/DWHGLOSS.HTM
Business intelligence (BI) is a business management term which refers to applications and technologies which are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about their company operations. …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business intelligence
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01.04.08
Posted in Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Enterprise/Corporate Performance Management (EPM/CPM), Oracle OBIEE at 3:03 pm by irusgroup
The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) had been using Microsoft Excel as its primary budgeting and planning tool. As the organization grew, the limitations of using Excel as an enterprise level budgeting and planning tool became painfully obvious, for all of the usual reasons and then some.
The Irus Group helped PBS understand the benefits and opportunities presented by moving to Oracle EPB (Enterprise Planning and Budgeting). When Oracle introduced EPB, Irus Group was one of only a dozen firms on the planet that were trained to design, develop, implement, and manage EPB. This support was critical to PBS as it was moving to an enterprise system for the first time. The enterprise nature of EPB would open up many financial management opportunities for PBS such as better reporting, easier consolidations, and more effective process management. Since this was such a high-risk endeavor for PBS and since only a handful of consulting firms were even familiar with EPB, PBS needed the Irus Group’s expertise in budgeting and planning and business intelligence to ensure that such a high-risk development effort went flawlessly.
Check out more in this case study.
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11.25.07
Posted in Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise/Corporate Performance Management (EPM/CPM), Oracle OBIEE at 4:27 pm by irusgroup
Clients of ours want to know what we see in the market place and how the recent spate of business intelligence company sales will affect them. We see two main results of the acquisitions: convergence and interoperability. Our clients want to protect their technology product investments and not start from scratch. So vendors are coming up with tools and applications to help them do that. For example, in Oracle’s case, there’s a big push towards service oriented architecture (SOA). Just ping the data source to get the relevant information that you want.
The consolidation in the BI space will force all of the big players into building a big, shared common BI platform. This captures whatever you need for analysis. You can then access that information from multiple sources. Which leads to the third thing, which is BI is becoming pervasive. With BI tools, you are making decisions based on information used to make previous decisions, so low level decision making can become fairly obvious and perhaps automated which allows you to use the BI tools to make higher level decisions. Analysts are no longer bogged down by doing clerk-level tasks and can actually focus on doing analysis.
And for example, instead of looking in the past to determine your top ten customers, you can use BI to predict who the top ten customers will be in the future. When you’re doing predictive analysis, you’re moving to more sophisticated data mining, and you can now get some actionable analytics.
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08.28.07
Posted in Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise/Corporate Performance Management (EPM/CPM) at 2:34 pm by irusgroup
CPM is a discipline and business intelligence software is the tool companies use to manage CPM. Of course most people measure corporate performance by looking at income sheet and the balance sheet. That’s one way to look at it. But through our client engagements, we have also measured corporate performance from, let’s say, an HR perspective. Another way can be customer satisfaction. For one company it might be the financial aspects, for another how well people perform. Another example is how green your company is or where they invest. Certain customers may not want to invest in companies that sell in certain countries. CPM helps determines how well your company is performing based on where you need to be.
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08.20.07
Posted in Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise/Corporate Performance Management (EPM/CPM) at 1:43 pm by irusgroup
Oracle has recently rebranded its Enterprise Performance Management applications as the Hyperion Financial Performance Management Applications. These solutions were recently rolled out to the market. We are excited to see the how quickly Oracle has positioned the Hyperion aps into the Oracle product line. Many of our business intelligence engagements involve financial process integration, (planning and budgeting) so we were anxiously awaiting the announcements. This fits in perfectly with the Irus Methodology and how we implement BI systems for our clients.
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08.16.07
Posted in Enterprise/Corporate Performance Management (EPM/CPM), Federal at 2:27 pm by irusgroup
The big trend in government contracting is performance based contracts. You have to determine what some of the metrics are, such as “all invoices will be sent by the third of the month.” And if the invoice is inaccurate, you can get negative points. Government program managers measure how well their contractors are performing to the project plan. Or how much turnover you are experiencing. Or percentage of business going to small business. OPM has come up with a number of metrics and companies need to report back how well they’re doing. This means they need systems in place to ensure that they can comply with the emerging government requirements.
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08.07.07
Posted in Enterprise/Corporate Performance Management (EPM/CPM) at 2:14 pm by irusgroup
In back-to-back announcements, Bear Stearns and Perot Systems give their finance chiefs the title of chief operating officer. This article on CFO.com confirms a trend that we’ve been seeing for a while with our customers. It makes sense, since the operations side of the business continues to demand better access to financial information and reporting from the finance side. CFO’s that can deliver information to their constituency as needed can easily bridge both functions.
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07.19.07
Posted in Enterprise/Corporate Performance Management (EPM/CPM), Federal at 3:06 pm by irusgroup
Budgeting and planning is essentially the same across vertical markets, however, in the public sector there are distinct differences that only a firm intimate with the process can understand. If I have a certain amount of money left to spend through the end of the year, and my spending curve is such that I will run out of money in the tenth month, I know that I need to do something now so that I don’t run out of money in the tenth month.
This may sound like a simple challenge, however, it’s not. It requires a sound and diligent process to ensure that the right data has been utilized to get the information and turn it into the knowledge to make the right business decisions.
The problem is that the government must have money available, so they need to find funds from other places to cover shortfalls. An example is the Iraq war. The amount allocated to the war initially was quickly used up so money had to be found in other parts of the government to fund the war. The impact of these decisions trickles down to the lowest level. For example, how easy is it to move the money allocated for upgrading base facilities to support soldiers on the ground?
Here’s the big issue. The good thing is that Government captures most of the information that they need. The bad thing is that they capture it in legacy systems that don’t talk to each other. What we see so often is the classic situation when someone gets information out of one system, then keys it in the second system, and then re-keys it in the third system and so on and so forth. Government understands that this is their system and has to deal with it, but they also know that there are smarter, more efficient ways to get to the data and make sense of it.
Unfortunately, the government has to make decisions based on data housed in multiple silos strewn across multiple data sources that don’t talk to one another. For instance, we had a government client who wanted to see budget vs. actuals reports at a glance, but couldn’t because the data was in two different data sites. It was nearly impossible for them to access the data and put into one report, until we built a new system for them that brought everything together.
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