Evolution of BI & the Future

Business Intelligence has come a long way from MIS reports to prebuilt dashboards to self-service to Chatbots. And along with this the end users have also evolved from mere consumers to explorers to data hungry power users.  

We can divide it into 3 periods,

1. Initial Era (1990 - 2005) - This was the beginning of the BI. There were static MIS reports and the end users were consumers who were heavily dependent on the IT team. 
2. Middle Era (2005 - 2020) - This was the middle ages, where BI was synonymous to interactive Dashboards with slice and dice capabilities. The end users have also evolved from consumers to explorers, who used features like slicers, drill down / through to envision different scenarios of the data.  
3. Modern Era (2020 onwards) - In the recent times there have been massive changes., The data hungry workforce wants more than dashboards, they want empowerment 💪, to create their own insights, or in other words self-service capability. With that comes SaaS models and cloud hosted platforms, which give flexibility of scale up and scale out with minimal effort. 

As per leading Marker Researchers, 

• Clients no longer concentrate on which BI platform provides better data visualization, dashboards, or OLAP (“slice and dice”) functionality; rather they are prioritizing platforms that are: 
• Native to their preferred hyperscaler platform
• Seamlessly integrate with business applications
• Built on API-first architecture
• In an ideal BI environment, 80% of all BI requirements should be carried out by the business users themselves 

But what lies ahead? What is beyond Self-Service? 

With introduction of AI, ML and other technology evolutions, the power users will no longer have create their own reports by themselves. The BI tools will be smart enough to understand their requirement and built reports for them. May be we can call it Autonomous Self-Service (like Autonomous cars 🚗) ..... 😇

In fact, it is no longer a thing of future. Let's take the following examples,

• Oracle Synopsis - It is the Mobile Analytics App that lets you quickly open and interact with spreadsheets and business data in a visual and intuitive way, while you're on the go.

It is a standalone mobile based BI reporting tool which takes excel as data source, available in both Android and IOS. Oracle Synopsis is very intuitive in nature and the end user do not need any technical training to use it or create and share reports. This app is ideal for the Travelling Salesmen, Medical Representatives, PMOs who are always on the go and have the need to share reports (mainly excel based) 24 x 7.

• Oracle Lens - It is also a mobile based tool, which can scan any scan any tabular data using mobile camera and create insights instantaneously. 

• ThoughtSpot Search - It helps Self-Service analysis using NLP. In the search bar the users can type the analysis / insight they are interested in, and the reports get generated. Therefore with minimal knowledge self-service can be performed.

• Power BI Insights - It creates auto insights from the data with minimal intervention. 

And the list goes on and on. 

That leads us to the next question about our future, what is going to happen to us the BI Consultants / Developers? Are we also get redundant and obsolete like our little Rexy 🦖(can't help it my son is a big fan of Rexy ... 😋) ?

To my opinion, we are not going to get extinct at least for now. However, with the advent of every evolution and modernization the old roles get replaced by new more advanced roles. I think the role of dashboard developer is going to get reduced as self-service becomes easier, smart and automated. But the backend structure and governance will become more important, the following activities would become more and more important. 

• Advisory - Helping clients and end users choose the right tools as they are going to get spoilt by choices. The set of tools must fulfil the requirement and complement the organization's long and short term technology roadmap.
• Designing BI Architecture - As BI tools becoming more advanced and complex and there are significant number of integration opportunities both upstream and downstream. Therefore designing a robust, scalable architecture becomes more important to support all the smart things on top.  
• Designing Data Mart - Somethings don't change, a solid scalable data model (Normalized, Denormalized, Star, Snowflake) is the foundation of the BI solution. And thanks to Mr. Ralph Kimball and Mr. Bill Inmon, there is enough of confusion already on which approach to choose, a top down or a bottom up.  
• Defining Metadata (Metrix, Dimensions, Hierarchies) - Once the ground work is done, the calculations and the logics need to be defined, so that the automation can use them create the answers / analysis users seek. 
• Governance - With empowerment comes governance. As more and more user are empowered the create their own analysis, that would lead to more and more confusion about the version of truth. To maintain single version of truth and standard across the organization, a governance process is very important. There has to be a Heimdall protecting the Bifröst. 

Connecting QlikView to Denodo

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Is it possible to show 2 lines in the same OBIEE graph, one for selected and other for all

A few days back one of my friends came up with a problem in OBIEE, is it possible to show a line graph having 2 lines in the same graph. One line representing Revenue by a selected Sales Person and another line as the average Revenue by the remaining Sales Persons.

This might be achieved through different ways, but what I preferred was to using a Presentation Variable.

1. I have created a union report, the 1st criteria contains, Month and Avg Revenue. 'All Sales Person' is a hardcoded dummy column.

Avg Revenue is coming directly from a fact, and it is a simple Average on Revenue.

2. The 2nd criteria contains Month and Avg Revenue with Filter in the formula.

I am using the formula = FILTER("Base Facts"."Avg Revenue" USING ("Sales Person"."E1  Sales Rep Name" IN ('@{var_SP}')))

Basically it will filter the Avg Revenue for a Sales Person, and the value of the Sales Person will be passed through the Presenation Variable var_SP.

And in the dummy column I put '@{var_SP}'. This will help me show the name of the selected Sales Person in the line graph.

3. Next I have created a Prompt to filter the Year and Sales Person (to pass the value for var_SP)

4. I have put them all together in the Dashboard. When I first run the report without any Sales Person selected, it shows me only the Avg Revenue for all Sales Persons.

But the moment I select a specific Sales Person, an additional line appears.

Now it is time to validate, if my report is giving right data or not. And for that purpose I have created 2 simple seperate reports with Month, Avg Revenue and Month, Sales Person (Aurelio Miranda only) and Avg Revenue.

The result is matching with the chart, and that validates the Line chart report.

Custom Style in OBIEE 11g / 12c

Let me take you through the steps for defining custom Skins and Styles in OBIEE. It is similar in 11g and 12c.

To start with, there is an sample ear file ORACLE_HOME/bi/bifoundation/jee/bicustom-template.ear

I copy and paste this ear file and rename it as bicustom.ear

I extract this ear file into a folder and then extract the war file inside the folder into another folder, let me name it bicustom_war.

Inside the bicustom_war/res folder there are 2 folders, and 1 xml file
1. s_Custom - folder for style
2. sk_Custom - folder for skin

3. filemap.xml - it contains the hierarchy for skins an styles

For the purpose of this demonstration, let me go into the  s_Custom/master. I am going to replace the existing custom.css and oracle_logo.png with new files for the customization purpose.

Once I am done with my changes, it is time to create the war file. And for that the prerequisite is to set the path for JDK.

Next step is to create the ear file. The command is same as of the war file.

Once the bicoustom.ear file is created I place it at the ORACLE_HOME/bi/bifoundation/jee folder. 

Now I need to deploy the ear file in the Weblogic Console. I go to Deployments

Click Lock & Edit, and click Install in the Deployments.

I navigate to ORACLE_HOME/bi/bifoundation/jee folder where I have kept the bicustome.ear file, and I select the ear file.

Next I select 'Install this deployment as an application'.

I select 'I will make the deployment accessible from the following location', and set the location as the ORACLE_HOME/bi/bifoundation/jee folder

I click Finish and the deployment is done.

Now I Activate the changes

Next I go to the Deployments again and select bicustom checkbox and start the new application.

If the deployment has happened successfully, then we can see a new option in Style drop down as 'Custom'.

I have created a sample report and put them into 2 dashboards. One with Style default 'Skyros'

And the other one with Style 'Custom'.

As we can see it has a different look and feel. There are different other styling options also in the folders which can be customized.

The details customizing steps can be further referred at Oracle Site.

Putting Horizontal and Vertical Records together in an OBIEE Report

Few days back one of friends came up with a very special requirement. He had 2 tables let's call them SALES_BUDGET_F, which stores the month wise budgeted sales, where the months are as the columns.

and SALES_ACTUAL_F, which stores the moth wise actual sales data, and this table is like a normal fact.

These 2 facts have joined by conformed dimensions Customer and Product. For the ease of our purpose in this case I have single dimension and let me call it CUSTOMER_PRODUCT_D. However having a single or multiple dimension will not cause any difference.

The objective is to show both the data together so that we can compare the Budget vs Actual.

Now before we proceed, I would like to mention this can be achieved through multiple ways, one of them can be creating an Opaque View in the  RPD or Materialized View. However in this case I will try to achieve the same through OBIEE.

In the logical layer I create a single fact with 2 LTS one for each of the physical facts. And the conformed dimensions are also mapped.

In the Fact - Sales, Year is mapped from both the facts. Actual Sales is computed from SALES_ACTUAL_F.

Month wise Budgeted Sales columns are calculated from month wise columns from the SALES_BUDGET_F. Like Jan Budgeted Sales = SALES_BUDGET_F.JAN

Now I start creating the report. First just to test if my tables are working fine, I create a simple report with Month ID (hard coded as 1 for Jan. I will be using it later for sorting) and Jan Budgeted Sales.

And it is working as desired.

Next I add columns for Month Name and Actual Sales (hard coded as 0)

I repeat it 11 more times in form of union for 12 months. And 1 additional criteria for Actual Sales, with Budgeted Sales column hard coded as 0.

Now let's check the result.

We need to get rid of these duplicate rows, and for that I use a Pivot view, with aggregation added on the measures.

And the net output looks like,

I put it in a dashboard with Customer, Product and Year prompt.

Before I conclude I would like to mention again that, this might be achieved through other ways too.