Business Intelligence and Oracle BIEE - OBIEE
Report and business intelligence
We all understand the word 'report', For most of us, we have the duty to collect data and combine them into report at the quarter end and send it to our manage, our manager combine reports from differnet subordiates and send it to his manager and so on.
'Report' is usually a description of 'what happen' in the enterpirse, It usually contain summary number of values, date and other field that descibe the happenings! So the company executives could have a overview of 'what happen' in the whole enterprise! e.g. total sales in west region, or total expense for the sales department. This facts is the basic of the executive desision for the enterprise.
Unfortunately, If the employee with the lower rank make the report based on month , the executives will lose the detail of every 'date', If we make the report based on 'Region', the executives will lose the detail of 'city'.We don't want to lose detail cause sometimes detail might lead to better decision.
Another limitation of report is that report is static, When the executive find out that the sales in a region is skyhigh, He might be interesting to find out which city in the region make up the most contribution. But he have to turn to another report that is reported based on city if there 're one exist. It would be nice if we could just click the region and the whole report turn into something more detail figure for cities.
These 'report' limitation lead to the development of Business Intelligence, all the above 'report' limitation is actually the basic function of business intelligence system or BI. which is a very common word today.
Business Intelligence is knowledge and conclusion out of the data for better decision
Whether 'report' or 'Business Intelligence', is some kind of knowledge we get from the company happenings. For example, from the example of sales for four region.
'Montly sales for each region'
East region: 1000
South region: 500
West region: 400
North region: 1500
From the above example , We know that 'North region' contribute most of our revenue and we also know that west region 's performance is not very good! With business intelligence system, we could drill down to find out that the best selling product in west region is something cheap, So we could make decison to ship more cheap product and less expensive product to the west region to improve the overall performance.
Business Intelligence & report system, is knowledge system out of the data that we could use to make better decision.
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition- OBIEE
OBIEE, is such a knowledge system product that provide tools for us to define data access, build data model, build analytic interactive report and dashboard for executive or department managers for more insight into business data and thus better business decision.