In yesterday’s article I posted the first half of an email interview with Phil Bates, architect for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition based down in Bristol, UK. Phil’s focus is on the vision, direction, architecture and development strategy for Oracle Business Intelligence products, and in today’s posting we ask him about the integration of Oracle Business Intelligence with Service-Orientated Architecture, how the metadata layer in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition will evolve over time, and how he sees Oracle’s dashboard and analysis tools developing into the future. Don’t forget, you can put any questions to Phil in the comments to this article, I’ll then gather all of the questions together with the ones for part 1 of the interview and pass them to Phil, who will then answer them in a follow-up interview post.
[Mark Rittman] “Phil, you’ve presented a few times recently at user group events on the convergence of BI and Service-Orientated Architecture, and the benefits of automated decision-making tools like Oracle Real-Time Decisions? What business benefits do you see with these technologies?”
[Phil Bates] “There’s a convergence of interest in BI and SOA technologies from customers who are implementing business process management solutions to gain greater agility. This is perhaps not surprising: SOA enables organizations to deploy and adapt business processes more quickly, orchestrating processes across a company’s existing heterogeneous applications and systems. Business Intelligence enables organizations to understand business process performance and key business goals by integrating the data from a companies existing heterogeneous applications and systems. The ability to deliver on the promise of business agility fundamentally requires good business intelligence to understand what changes to make to business processes. Put another way – business agility requires business insight. Equally the value of business insight itself is also greatly enhanced when we can quickly act upon that insight to drive business performance improvements. So BI and SOA technologies are, I believe, inherently complementary and are increasingly both found at the heart of an enterprise architecture strategy.
A service oriented architecture typically requires some infrastructure to formalize the definition and orchestration of business processes, rules and events. This requires technology such as the Oracle Business Process Architect, Oracle BPEL Process Manager (BPM), Oracle Business Rules Engine (BRE), Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and the Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)- all components of the Oracle SOA suite. The SOA Suite also contains a set of technologies for integrating business processes and events with companies existing infrastructure and applications.
Convergence between BI and SOA enables customers to gain insight into business process performance and drive business performance improvements more effectively. I’ve seen three distinct patterns of integration arising here:
I. The use of BI to gain visibility into business process performance,
SOA infrastructure such as Oracle BPM generates key business process data – e.g. process cycle times, frequency of operations, approval times, delivery delays etc. that can be integrated with data from the transactional systems the processes interact with and viewed and analysed in Oracle Business Intelligence dashboards. In addition we have seen an emergence of innovative customer solutions using Oracle Business Intelligence to monitor, analyse and report against human workflow activities (tasks, assignments, approvals etc.) that are orchestrated using the human workflow capabilities of Oracle BPM. There’s also a set of use cases where it makes sense to use BI and BAM together to integrate historical and realtime information within a common dashboarding and alerting environment. We demonstrated examples of how the integration between Oracle BIEE and Oracle BAM today enables the realization of these use cases at a recent UK OUG event in London.
II. The ability to transform insight into action by interacting with business processes from BI tools
Business Intelligence tools have traditionally been used to analyse and monitor key business data, supporting the ability to drill to detail to understand the cause of an underlying issue. Once an issue is understood, users typically need to take some form of action that is very often an invocation of a business process. For example, a BI dashboard may allow a user to monitor cashflow performance, and drill to detail to understand key issues such as a customer having large number of overdue invoices outstanding. In this scenario the next step is for the controller to take action – by invoking a business process to address the problem – for example to initiate a credit hold or a debt collection process. With Oracle Business Intelligence, these processes can be invoked directly from dashboards, alerts and/or iBots (intelligent sense/respond agents) and orchestrated within the business process engines in the SOA suite. The process may embed human workflows to handle approvals and notifications.
Combined with the ability to gain visibility into business process performance this can provide a much richer, empowering user experience for the Business Intelligence users. For example, the dashboard in the example above can also contain views tracking the actions and state of the business processes the user has initiated.
III. The ability to embed BI as a service into business process workflows and rules.
Oracle’s Business Intelligence products have a rich set of web services to enable the use of BI as a service. This allows business processes orchestrated in the BPM suite to invoke Oracle business intelligence services to, for example, deliver timely, personalized reports and alerts at key points in the process, and to use metrics and KPIs defined in the BI systems to make effective decisons within the business process. For example, a procurement business process can be orchestrated to select a supplier based on supplier performance metrics that are accessed by invoking the Oracle Business Intelligence web service interfaces. This approach has substantial benefits in that it can leverage the enterprise semantic model within the BI server so the definitions of key metrics can be used consistently in dashboards, business processes and reports, as well leveraging the BI EE server to decouple the business process from the complexity of underlying data sources associated with these metrics.
Real Time Decisions further extends these capabilities to allow adaptive decision making within business processes. This is particularly useful in business processes where there are particularly complex and fast changing rules that should determine which branch of a workflow to take. For example consider an insurance company looking to select a supplier – e.g. a plumber – to deal with an emergency. In this scenario, optimal supplier selection may be based on a set of complex, realtime, and fluctuating conditions – locality, time of day, nature of issue, size of supplier, etc. Real Time Decisions can be used to make the decisions within the workflow and learns from the outcomes (happy customers, cost, right first time, supplier availability etc.) to optimize the decision making within the business process.”
[MR] “How would you like to see the metadata layer in Oracle BI Enterprise Edition developing over time? Do you forsee a time in the future when Oracle’s BI tools share a common metadata layer and a common development environment?
[PB] “Development of the BI EE metadata layer is core to our strategy and there are a number of interesting themes to this. We are investing substantially in extending the metadata capabilities to exploit best practices we’ve identified in developing the BI applications and supporting customers building bespoke BI solutions. One of the exciting areas is to extend the model first paradigm to make it easier to manage the full BI application development lifecycle. The model first paradigm builds on our experience that it is better practice to develop BI applications initially from the business user and business analyst perspective to define the key analytic use cases users need, independently of the underlying data storage. Once the semantic model is defined, the physical model and associated ETL can be generated directly from the BI tools. We delivered the first increment of the model first vision in 10.1.3.3 with the aggregate persistance feature – future releases will extend the capabilities in this area, driving down the cost and complexity of developing BI solutions.
Today, the Oracle BI EE components share a common metadata layer across the BI EE components and BI applications. One of the key strategic priorities for us with the integration of Hyperion into the BI Suite is to ensure we can leverage common semantic definition across the product suite and in the near term this will be achieved through a combination of interoperability and metadata exchange. For example, integration between the BI EE server and Essbase enables the BI EE metadata model to be used to query Essbase. Essbase can also access BI EE using the BI EE ODBC interface (and hence semantic model).”
[MR] “In terms of usability and user productivity, how do you see Oracle’s dashboard and analysis tools developing into the future? Will Oracle Answers eventually be developed to cater for OLAP analysis, and perhaps planning and budgeting?”
[PB] “Usability and user productivity is central to our product strategy and we continue to invest strongly in this area. We do believe that pervasive use of BI requires that BI content can be delivered and used in many different environments – portals, dashboards, mobile devices, MS Office, desktop gadgets, search, transactional applications etc. The releases planned over the next 18 months have many features that continue the emphasis on usability, enhanced visualizations, charting, graphics and interactivity.
Answers today supports analysis against a variety of OLAP data sources including Essbase, Oracle OLAP, Microsoft Analysis Services, and SAP BW and we will continue to enhance the ability to leverage the computational capabilities of these data sources. We are also investing substantially to extend the capabilities in Answers to enable rich multi-dimensional analysis capabilities that OLAP users are accustomed to, for example the ability to use an explicitly dimensional query model, define and save selections, work with different kinds of hierarchies and define custom dimension members and aggregates. For planning and budgeting, Hyperion Planning is the strategic product set handling the broader lifecycle of planning processes.”
Thanks Phil. As I said earlier, if you have any questions for Phil on the answers he gave in this interview, add them as a comment to this post. Once they’re all in and Phil is back from Holiday, I’ll be back with a follow-up post with Phil’s answers.
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