How to Find a Hyperion Administrator

Oracle Hyperion is a comprehensive, web-based Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) system that consists of three major products: Oracle Essbase (or “Essbase”), Oracle Hyperion Planning (or “Planning”), and Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (or “HFM”). Along with other modules in the Oracle Hyperion suite, they offer the tools for financial management of large enterprises with multiple reporting entities.

Oracle Hyperion has revolutionized enterprise management, simplifying reconciliation and closings and providing real-time data analytics in customizable dashboards and reports. But it doesn’t run by itself. Organizations need a qualified, certified Hyperion administrator to oversee the system’s operation.

Finding a qualified Hyperion administrator often requires a long and difficult search. Keeping a qualified Hyperion administrator is even more difficult, as they are in demand and the work can require long hours, sometimes under a lot of pressure.

The result is a tremendous shortage of Hyperion administrators. Often, the job is added onto an untrained person’s workload with dissatisfying results. A new white paper from Datavail entitled, Where, Oh Where Has My Hyperion Administrator Gone? presents an alternative solution for finding qualified staff to manage your Hyperion system. The white paper is available for download at Datavail and defines the qualifications and responsibilities of Hyperion administrators in great detail. This blog post explores the different ways of hiring a Hyperion administrator and the benefits and drawbacks of each method.

Hiring a Full-Time Hyperion Administrator

Let’s begin at the end. Your Hyperion Administrator, who you invested money in to train on a system that is not easily learned, has decided to move into consulting, has taken a higher paying job elsewhere, or perhaps has simply decided to move on for one reason or another. Either way, you now do not have someone to manage your Hyperion platform. Which means important financial planning and reports are now going to fall to the wayside.

Now you must hire a replacement and your choices are not good. Without the Hyperion system, closings must be done by hand. In an organization this large, that’s going to be a nightmare. Every day, new people are being hired, others are leaving the company. Someone must take people out of the system, add people into the system, manage permissions and approvals, and update the software to reflect changes in things such as product names, prices, and packages available.

Every day, the clock is ticking and the unfinished reports are stacking up. This puts additional pressure on you to hire someone fast rather than wait for the right person for your team. That’s a risky way to hire. You can try dumping the Hyperion administrator job onto someone else in IT; in fact, that’s what you’re doing in the interim. How’s that working? Most likely, not very well. Soon you will need to hire someone to supplement the now overworked IT person and a Hyperion admin.

If you hire someone quickly you could potentially lose them quickly, too, due to a bad fit, and end up looking for a Hyperion admin still. If you do not fix the problems that cost you the previous administrator, you will likely lose the next one for the same reasons. You need a Hyperion administrator that can help maximize your investment in Hyperion by increasing end-user adoption. You can’t ask that from someone in IT who hasn’t even trained on Hyperion.

Use a Managed Services Provider

There’s another way to get the Hyperion administration you need without the nightmare of hiring. A managed services contract with a partner like Datavail that specializes in Hyperion offers many advantages over hiring in.

Let’s look at some of them:

Instant Support

You don’t have to worry about your Hyperion administrator walking out the door. The problem of turnover becomes a non-issue and should you need to dial-up or dial-down support, Datavail’s team and support level adjusts accordingly.

Take Your Time

With a managed services contract, you can support your existing Hyperion administrator during off-hours, vacations, and sick days. You scale up the contract if someone quits, take your time finding exactly the right replacement for that person, then scale down the managed services when the new admin comes on board. You don’t have to make a rushed decision or accept someone lacking skill because you are desperate.

High-Level Expertise

With a managed services contract, you get access to people at the very high end of the salary scale with many years of experience working on dozens of similar systems. If you only need someone at that level for a couple of hours a month, you only pay for a couple of hours a month.

A Team of Specialists

A managed service provider such as Datavail, not only has high-level expertise but also a deep bench in all areas of specialty. We have consultants that know Unix systems and others that work mostly with Windows systems. We have specialists on the HFM side and we have people who are wizards at Planning and Essbase. You decide how much time is devoted to each system.

No More Hiring Two People for One Job

It’s very common for organizations with Hyperion to have two admins to get coverage for both HFM and Planning. With a managed services contract, you pay for only the hours you need and the specialties you need, with easy access to extra resources when you need them.

Flexible Delivery

A managed services contract can provide the boost you need, when you need it, without hiring. Installing Hyperion for the first time? Datavail can get you through the installation and hand off the system to your in-house team. Are you buying another company and need to integrate their system into yours? With a managed services contract, you have access to specialists in installation, migration, integration, reporting, dashboard design, auditing, compliance, or any other Hyperion function.

Datavail’s Hyperion Solution

Stopping and restarting your EPM system when trouble arises is not a solution. Watching the backlog of reports and error logs grow is not a solution. Hiring the first person you find with “Hyperion” on their resume is also not a good solution. The only strong solution to managing Hyperion problems is to engage a managed services provider to help you supplement your existing team or replace employees you may have lost.

In addition to experience people, Datavail also brings its automated instrumentation to the table. Datavail’s proactive monitoring platform reduces the amount of hours that would otherwise be spent reviewing back-end logs.

If you would like an assessment of your EPM system or a budget for bringing your financial management system into the modern age, contact Datavail today. Datavail is a specialized IT services company focused on Data Management with solutions in BI/DW, analytics, database administration, custom application development, and enterprise applications. We provide both professional and managed services delivered via our global delivery model, focused on Microsoft, Oracle and other leading technologies.