Another year has gone by, a lot of amazing things have transpired, and the ArtOfBI.com is still here sharing the good word on Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management.  Again, a big thanks goes to all of the readers of The Art of Business Intelligence.  This year we promise more great articles, associations, presentation, products, and hopefully a contest or two (yes, with prizes).

On a career note this was a big year for me personally.  The very brilliant Oracle BI specialist consulting (professional services) organization I’ve worked with for several years, BI Consulting Group (BICG), was acquired by Capgemini.  Capgemini is a very large Information Technology services organization based in France with global reach and a software agnostic portfolio of offerings.  My wonderful boss, Amy Mayer, did an amazing job building BICG and is still leading the troops behind the Capgemini Oracle Analytics practice.

ArtOfBI.com and another team that I have been helping develop some amazing open source tools, Fyght Group, has launched the first plug-in products for Oracle Business Intelligence 11g.  Project Amelia and Metadata Search (MDSearch) for Oracle BI 11g are both available for download.  Take a look at those when you get a chance. Get ready for Social Collaborative Business Intelligence from BITeamwork.

Oracle Open World 2011 was also a grand success this year. I had the esteemed opportunity to speak at the ODTUG user group session as well as at a main session with my colleague from Capgemini, Marty Mersinger, on Oracle BI 11g’s Action Framework.  Java, Java, Java – ‘nuf said.

2011 also marked the start of the ArtOfBI.com podcast which has had some amazing guests including authors, bloggers, and market analysis experts.  We are adding more interviews to the docket for 2012 for your listening enjoyment and intellectual ferment so keep an eye on our podcast feed.

The Oracle ACE program both rejected my application and approved me in 2011.  That might just be a first but I’ll have to confirm that with the good folks at the Oracle ACE program.  I am super stoked about that acheivement and I hope to contribute a lot in 2012.  I think my plan is to have Mark Hurd transition his current role to me in about 6 years.  I’ll start working on that next week – I’m not joking.  A big thanks to Justin, Lillian, and Brian S for the respect.  I just got my pully in the mail last week – it looks brilliant on.  Cheers!

Visitors and fans of ArtOfBI.com continue to increase.  So some people do like what I’m churning out over in this little corner of the web.  Monthly visits are now at ~10,000 per month.  Those are vanity metrics (thanks Eric Ries for the term) I know but artofbi.com is both a passion and an experiment.  There is consideration in 2012 to make ArtOfBI.com more of a destination than just a blog. The aim is for more growth and there is a path.  I’m just not sure if this site should start walking it.

Lastly, I’d like to thank everyone who is passionate about technology. If you understand that technology is a means to an end and not the end itself then you understand that in the end it is people who count the most.  At the end of the day, it is people that you work for and people that buy your product. It is people who innovate.  It is people who share and people who care.

Thanks again for a great 2011.

Best,

Christian

You just have to love Oracle Business Intelligence and the enhancements over OBI 10g.  Again, my recommendation is to get OBI 11g in your org as soon as possible.  At a minimum a dev environment just so you can check out the cool features like the one this blog post talks about, data type sensitive prompts.

What exactly are we talking about here?  We are talking about intelligent object creation assistance.  Instead of just the typical, kludgy, “show all” functionality you see in some other tools when developing a dashboard, report, etc. in OBI 11g presentation services, the OBI 11g interface can intelligently provide you with options related to the context in which you are developing.  Let’s take for example the development of a simple dashboard prompt.  In this post I will seek to provide a quick tutorial “slash” illustration of this concept of context sensitive object creation.  I am using the SampleApp that can be downloaded from Oracle’s BI website download page.

First Example – Calendar Prompt via Date/TimeStamp Data Type

1. Login to the OBI 11g Portal
2. Choose to create a New > Dashboard Prompt
   
3. Select Sample Sales as the Subject Area
   
4. On the Dashboard Prompt creation page click the plus icon to expose the add prompt type list
5. Select “Column Prompt…”
   
6. From the Subject Area column selector prompt choose Time > T00 Calendar Date
   
7. When prompted make sure the User Input drop-down box has the Calendar option selected
   
8. Click OK
9. The prompt is now ready to previewed down in the bottom section.  Click on the calendar icon next to the empty field.
   
10. Viola! A beautiful calendar is present showing OBI 11g’s Web 2.0 functionality for date/timestamp data types.
    

Second Example – Slider Prompt via INT Data Type

1. Continuing from the first example, use the plus icon to expose the add prompt type list to create a second prompt.
2. Select “Column Prompt…”
3. From the Subject Area column selector prompt choose Base Facts > 1-Revenue
   
4. Click OK
5. In the New Prompt window, expand the User Input drop-down box and select Slider as the option
   
6. The New Prompt window will change shape to show additional options based on the selected user input context.  In the Lower Limit field input 1000000 (one million).  In the Upper Limit field input 10000000 (ten million).
   
7. Click OK
8. Viola! Again, another beautiful web 2.0 prompt is shown in the bottom section of the window showcasing the slider prompt.  This prompt can be used to predicate results to fall within a specific metric (Revenue) range while providing the user with an intuitive analytics experience.
   

Conclusion

In OBI 11g, clearly Oracle has done a great job with several of the front-end functional pieces of the application.  This is only the first release of OBI 11g and we are only 5 months in to the GA of the tool.  With the expected release of the R1 patch to enhance and fix several R1 bugs, with some customer feedback I think we all should be optimistic at what lies ahead for Oracle in the Business Intelligence space.

Oracle has recently stepped-up and done a really cool integration with their 11g release of Oracle Data Mining on Amazon’s EC2 Cloud.

You can check it out for yourself here.

You can get step-by-step instruction on how to launch and run your own environment for testing/demo purposes, here.  This is a great way to introduce new users to this amazing technology that I think has always bleeding edge.

I wonder if they’ll start doing this with all of their new technology releases.