Doing some Essbase / Oracle BI 11g integration lately, I actually decided to read one of the prompts from the 11.1.2 release of the Oracle Essbase Administration Console.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am a big fan of language and linguistics.  I enjoy reading FAZ as much as the WSJ. I often misspell words when typing to quikkly.  However, I usually pay greater attention to detail when someone is paying me to write.  So when I saw this incorrect sentence in EAS I couldn’t help but get a bit nastalgic for the good old early console gaming error and the now pulp techy saying, “All your base are belong to us“.  This seemed to me the perfect Essbase twist on that saying.

I’m envisioning T-Shirts at Oracle Open World, hats, bumper stickers and the like.  I think even Edward Roske will want to use this title in the next book of his Essbase series.

I asked the question to a group of Business Intelligence end-users the other day, “Would your company supply individuals within your organization Blackberry Playbooks to take advantage of the Mobile BI technology from their BI tool first or would they all get iPads?”.  Seemingly all at once a resounding negative air about the Blackberry tablet filled the room, then someone stated, “Blackberry missed the boat when it comes to tablets”.  Okay, I thought it was still a footrace but apparently this is a common sentiment and most declare iPad as the clear winner.  This post really isn’t about market share for tablet technology but rather about what appears to be an emerging concept that gleamed from that conversation.  Prior to asking that question I had originally thought that since RIM’s Blackberry device clearly controlled the market with their “blueberries” several years ago that most companies would simply continue to adopt and leverage whatever RIM put out on the table.

Okay some IT folks still need a “crack-berry” if they are on a support team for their organization.  And if you compare support with BI you are talking re-active versus proactive, yes, I know. But with Mobile BI becoming so pervasive what will the investment look like inside of these large organizations in order to consume their BI more readily.  I think a decision is getting made about low total cost of ownership, investment in physical devices, and the real need to provide something other than a laptop to each and every analyst within an organization just to see the same data they could see if they just waited 5-minutes to walk back to their cubical.

What resulted from the conversation I had with the group of BI Folks was my better understanding for the emerging initiative called Bring Your Own Device.  Today is June 21, 2011 and if you Google “Bring Your Own Device” you will find a lot of recent article results on the topic but I know that the concept isn’t new.  I recall reading a report about Google corporate allowing its employees to use any laptop and any Operating System that they wanted to.  You see the folks at Google are smarter than most pedestrian organizations and they can still efficiently support and keep secure many different systems without necessary standardizing on just one.  But they are Google so enough said.  Perusing these BYOD articles, I hit this one, http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal-tech/smart-phones/230600156, from Information Week which talks a bit about healthcare and security concerns with tablets in an organization.  I think this is relevant to business intelligence in that if you happen to misplace your smart phone or tablet that is running a BI application, your company’s analytics are exposed.  So clearly some mechanism for security needs to be in place almost at a middle tier in order to meet this security concern head on.

As it relates to Oracle BI it is clear that mobile technology is a very desired extension of the enterprise suite.  The new release of Oracle BI on the iOS (iPad / iPhone) this year was interesting enough that two top contributors in the Oracle BI space, John Minkjan and Kevin McGinley, gave presentations on the topic at Rittmanmead’s BI Forum 2011 in Atlanta this year.

As it relates to tool agnostic Business Intelligence there is clearly a lot more to BYOD that I have rambled about here.  But I think this is a topic worth exploring in more detail as the tablet market is now providing a new degree of difficulty and opportunity for those who are seated in Information Technology; both the makers and the shakers.  I’m just trying to get in from the Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management angle to figure out where I can get off the sidelines and into the game.

Let me know what your thoughts are for Business Intelligence on tablets.  Are you rocking an iPad, iPad2 or an Android?

Putting the ArtOfBI podcast together guerrilla bare-bones on-the-cheap style is quite interesting.  There have been some challenges but ultimately with some open source software and some digging it has come together nicely.

Currently I’ve been able to leverage Audacity for the audio and a WordPress Plug-In, Podcasting for the hook-up on the RSS feed required by iTunes, etc.

A few challenges I’ve encountered thus far are:

• Recording the podcast, interview style
  • So, recording the first podcast was very straightforward – Just a computer running an audio capture program like Audacity and a microphone.  But getting other people on the same recording kostenlos was initially a challenge, but then there was Google Voice.  Google Voice is free from Google and when someone phones your Google Voice line, simply press a key (Number 4) after you answered the call and the Google Voice call goes into record mode.  Press the number 4 or hang-up to end the recording.  After the call, the recording is in your Google Voice inbox with the ability to download it in MP3 format. Sweet!
• Adding an image to an audio file
  • This is very interesting because I never knew that an audio file itself could be outfitted with a separate image file then combined. Though, it makes sense, I never had the need for it.  So, this blog post, http://homepage.mac.com/rfwilmut/notes/faq.html#coverart, gave the quick one-two that I needed to make it happen.

On top of those challenges a few other procedural efforts have also been very enlightening. These include:

• Submitting the ArtOfBI.com Podcast to iTunes
  • Honestly, this was not as bad as I thought it would be.   Apple has clearly done there homework and has put just enough red-tape in one’s path to ensure that submissions are BS and that the submitter has actually done their homework.  The Art Of Business Intelligence podcast was just accepted today to the iTunes podcast library, you can subscribe here, http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/art-of-business-intelligence/id440812458

All in all so far the podcast has garnered decent feedback.  We’ve several interviews lined up as of May 31,2010 now its just time to execute.  I am still looking to fill the calendar for topics over the next few months as I ramp up for Oracle Open World 2011 (holy smokes, I just Googled for the OOW link and see that Sting and Tom Petty are performing, Awesome!).  If you know of any interesting things happening in the Business Intelligence world leave a comment or drop me a line and I’ll be sure to follow-up.  Its Go Time!

Cheers,

Christian