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Art of BI: 5 Essential Best Practices for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications

Author: Christian Screen | | December 15, 2016

Implementing best practices for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA) could help an organization set standards for configuration, security mapping, data retrieval, report creation, and analysis. Dashboard and report development, when done right, could provide insights into the business, not just data on reports. Datavail’s recent white paper, Improving Public Sector Analytics with Oracle Business Intelligence Software, details how these best practices helped a public sector organization operate more efficiently viewing their financial information. To give you a snapshot of how we achieved these ends, below are three best practices for implementing OBIA:

Make use of OBIA’s Security Mapping Functionality

With OBIA you can seamlessly integrate and tightly enhance your security model source to allow the right content to be shown to the right user. This lets you align your instance of OBIA with the security model of your source system (ex: E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, or JD Edwards), enabling your employees to have access that’s restricted according to their job function or department. The OBIA security options are flexible and the administrator can easily authenticate and show critical business data to the right people on demand.

Develop a Report-building Strategy

Increasing the functionality of information systems helps enhance the accuracy and intuitiveness of business processes and reporting. Standardizing methods of pulling data and training users on how to prioritize data and eliminate large data dumps greatly enhances report building and eventually aims to provide a culture analytics of analytics.

Below is a summary of setup and user steps in report building:

Standardization Considerations for Development

  1. Create data template
  2. Create layout template
  3. Register data and template definition metadata; load data template and layout template
  4. Define prompts and filters, values and labels
  5. Capture definitions of what the report is used for and what users will use the report

Standardization Considerations for Users

  • Understand your delivery options
  • Construct new customizable reports that closely match the users’ needs
  • Customize dashboards in order to see the data you need in real time
  • Train on best practices for report building and navigation

Standardize on OBIA System Terminology

A standardized process that runs across departments is crucial for the success of reporting, communication, and implementation of OBIA processes. By training all departments on the set of standard terms to use when referring to the Data Warehouse and the OBIA/OBIEE tool which will be used for reporting increases the accuracy and functionality of data and information systems. A centralized reporting system is able to provide an automated, consolidated, and unified view of analytics across departments in an organization for both managerial and administrative staff.

Please download Datavail’s recently released white paper, Improving Public Sector Analytics with Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) Software, for more details on the best practices for OBIA. Datavail is the largest provider of data and database administration (DBA) services in North America. The BI & analytics expertise of Datavail’s more than 600 DBAs, analysts, developers and consultants has resulted in a powerful resource for your integrations, implementations, and upgrades across the Oracle stack, including Hyperion, OBIEE, OBIA, GoldenGate, Weblogic and more.

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