Business Performance Management & OSSM - Part # 2

In my last blog, wrote about the following,

• What is Enterprise Performance Management?
• Balanced Scorecard Framework & its four perspectives
• Scorecard Components

This section(s) of the blog shall cover,

• Terminologies such as KPIs, Objectives, Initiatives, Strategy Maps, etc.,
• Oracle BI - EPM Architecture

KPI (Key Performance Indicator) - In general, Key Performance Indicator represents the result of a business measure (for example - Operational Cost, Attrition Rate, etc.,) that are being evaluated against a specific target value associated to that measure.  In the context of Balance Scorecard, these KPIs are used to assess the progress of the objectives and intiatives that comprises of the overall Organizational Strategy.

Objectives - Objectives are the desired / expected outcomes of the overall Organizational Strategy; objectives shall become meaningless unless otherwise associated with one or more KPIs to measure the progress of the objectives. For example, an Objective can be improved Employee satisfaction within the Organization for which KPIs that can be associated are Attrition rate; Employee Satisfaction Index etc.,

Initiatives - Initiatives are set of tasks or in some cases could be even projects that have been carried out to accomplish the objectives in a stipulated period of time within an organization.  As the tasks / projects involve various activities within an intiative, it might be supporting many objectives.  For example, Go-Green Initiative in a department can reduce the Operational cost and also improves the profitability.

Strategy Maps - Strategy Map is a pictorial representation of the strategic goals that are being defined within an organization depicting the objectives that are being defined for the scorecard aligned with two or more perspectives.  In addition to the BSC framework's 4 perspectives, user can define their own perspective if required.

Oracle BI - EPM Architecture

The following diagram depicts the Oracle BI-EPM architecture (original source by Oracle however redefined for this blog)

Oracle BI (Business Intelligence) Foundation Suite consists of the following,

• Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 11g
• Oracle BI Publisher
• Oracle Essbase
• Oracle Scorecard & Strategy Management

 

In my personal opinion, OBIEE11g has been significantly competitive with other reporting/BI tools when compared to OBIEE 10g.

 

Some of my experiences with respect to OBIEE 11g key features are as follows (there are many more J),

• Integration of Scorecard & Strategy Management with OBIEE
• Security is delegated to Oracle Fusion Middleware (i.e., Oracle Enterprise Manager Console) and leveraged using the Oracle Platform Security Services
• Usage of Flash components for Advanced Vizualization
• Zoom in & Zoom out of Graphs at both X-axis enables us to define a single report with a specific hierarchy of a dimension; leveraging the zoom facility to view the report at a specific level
• Slider facility
• Integration of Action Framework
• Mobile Integration (iPad & iPhone) with a limitation of not having drilling of reports from the device
• Seamless integration of Geospatial stuff within the dashboards
• etc.,

OSSM is an integrated component of OBIEE i.e., bundled with the OBIEE 11g along with Answers; the advantage is that the KPIs are defined in the core metadata (RPD of OBIEE) and can be easily correlated with the objectives defined in OSSM. Since the KPIs are defined in the core metadata, the actual / target data from operational source systems or datawarehouses in order to measure the progress of an objective is done easily.

In the next section of the blog, shall provide the following,

• Terminologies within OSSM such as Scorecard Editor, KPI watchlist etc.,
• Steps to create a Scorecard in OSSM

Until then.. please wait.. I appreciate your patience