As organizations are planning to implement Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBI Apps) and others are in various stages of their OBI Apps implementations, most seek advice on the best approach to achieve the maximum return on investment, delivering business value and driving user adoption

1. Avoid 5 Common Risks
Implementing Oracle Business
Intelligence Applications - and
Get Results
February, 2011
Sameer Agrawal
Consulting Director – Business
Intelligence
A Jade Global White Paper

2. COLLABORATE 11 Copyright ©2011 by Sameer Agrawal Page 1
Avoid 5 Common Risks Implementing Oracle Business
Intelligence Applications - and Get Results
Contents
2. Executive Summary
2. Introduction to OBI Applications
3. Implementation Approach
3. Not Realizing the Full Potential of OBI Apps
4. Project Resources
4. Change Management and Training
5. Post Production Support
5. Conclusion
7. Author Biography

3. COLLABORATE 11 Copyright ©2011 b
Executive Summary
Businesses are fully aware that business intelligence (BI) is no longer a luxury item but a critical
requirement to optimize corporate profits and performance.
implement Oracle Business Intelligence Applications
stages of their OBI Apps implementations
maximum return on investment, delivering business value and driving user adoption. This
attempts to cover tried and tested strate
greatest risk to an organization when implementing OBI
Introduction to OBI Applications
OBI Apps are complete, prebuilt BI solutions that provide timely, fact
activities across the entire organization. They gather relevant data and aggregate it into the most
appropriate metrics and formats for the business
user. Because data is pulled from multiple
siloed views are eliminated and cross
analysis becomes possible. Everyone
executives to front-line employees
and in-context insight that is personalized, relevant,
and actionable.
OBI Apps deliver this extensive business content
through dashboards, metrics, alerts, guided analytics,
and reports. The user’s role and function determine
exactly what content is appropriate and should be
delivered. By delivering relevant, role
to the right business users, you can increase user
adoption and ensure that the data is used to enhance
business performance.
OBI Apps not only cuts down
implementation times from months
or years to weeks or months, it
allows a very tight integration with
your existing ERP and CRM
systems delivering a consistent
view of your enterprise
information.
The value of OBI Apps compared
to traditional, in-house BI
solutions is clear: quicker time to
deploy, less overall cost, an
enterprise view of data, role-based
Copyright ©2011 by Sameer Agrawal
Businesses are fully aware that business intelligence (BI) is no longer a luxury item but a critical
requirement to optimize corporate profits and performance. As organizations are planning to
implement Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBI Apps) and others are in various
stages of their OBI Apps implementations, most seek advice on the best approach to achieve the
maximum return on investment, delivering business value and driving user adoption. This
cover tried and tested strategies on how to manage five critical areas that present the
greatest risk to an organization when implementing OBI Apps.
Introduction to OBI Applications
OBI Apps are complete, prebuilt BI solutions that provide timely, fact-based insight into
activities across the entire organization. They gather relevant data and aggregate it into the most
appropriate metrics and formats for the business
ta is pulled from multiple systems,
siloed views are eliminated and cross-functional
analysis becomes possible. Everyone—from
line employees—gets complete
context insight that is personalized, relevant,
eliver this extensive business content
through dashboards, metrics, alerts, guided analytics,
and reports. The user’s role and function determine
exactly what content is appropriate and should be
delivered. By delivering relevant, role-based content
you can increase user
adoption and ensure that the data is used to enhance
Figure 1. The main components of OBI Apps
implementation times from months
allows a very tight integration with
The value of OBI Apps compared
solutions is clear: quicker time to
based
Figure 2. Using OBI Apps significantly reduces the amount of time needed
to complete each of the four steps in building and deploying a BI solution.
Page 2
Businesses are fully aware that business intelligence (BI) is no longer a luxury item but a critical
organizations are planning to
and others are in various
, most seek advice on the best approach to achieve the
maximum return on investment, delivering business value and driving user adoption. This paper
areas that present the
based insight into
activities across the entire organization. They gather relevant data and aggregate it into the most
Figure 1. The main components of OBI Apps
. Using OBI Apps significantly reduces the amount of time needed
to complete each of the four steps in building and deploying a BI solution.

4. COLLABORATE 11 Copyright ©2011 by Sameer Agrawal Page 3
views for all employees, closed-loop processing and built-in best practices.
Implementation Approach
Customers need to decide on what implementation approach is suitable for their organization and
BI requirements. One has to choose between the Big Bang approach vs. a more Phased approach.
Traditionally, BI projects have been known to add value only when they are phased out. The
important thing to note is to deliver quick wins so that users stay interested and tuned. In case of
OBI Apps, you may want to start out with the more robust modules like Financials and
Procurement.
The other choice customers need to make is the Out of the Box (OOTB) vs. customized/
extended deployment. From what we have seen, OOTB serves as a great foundation for
extending your BI footprint. The business community gets an opportunity to see the basic
capabilities of the application and it helps them craft the requirements for the next phase of the
project. Depending on the modules deployed, there may be some standard reports that can be
used but most organizations end up creating their own reports and dashboards. A new
implementation with many customizations can get prolonged and costly. Also, any extensions
that you plan should conform to the Oracle guidelines for supportability and future upgrades.
Many customers already have robust data warehouses that have been built over a period of many
years and have all the business rules required. If this data warehouse is scalable and it meets
most of your reporting requirements, you may just want to deploy the OBIEE reporting layer
instead of deploying OBI Apps. It will be very costly to replicate a custom home grown DW into
OBI Apps and probably not give you the benefits immediately.
OBI Apps implementations are much easier to manage if you already have a stable transaction
system (Oracle EBS, CRM or other supported source system). You again two options:
1) Implement OBI Apps and Transaction systems together as part of one big project
2) Have a lag between your OBI Apps and Transaction system implementation
In option one you’ll realize the benefits of your investment much more quickly, but it’s riskier as
typically there are last minute design changes on the upstream transaction systems that need to
be incorporated in the downstream OBI Apps design.
In option two, you minimize the risks mentioned in option one, but you delay the realization of
the benefits of an integrated BI environment.
As a customer, one wants to get the best of both worlds: realize the benefits of their investment
quickly while mitigating risks. The bottom line is to understand the benefits and risks associated
with each approach and manage appropriately.
Not Realizing the Full Potential of OBI Apps
Organizational readiness for OBI Apps can impact your overall implementation. If the users
come from an operational mindset and have been mostly using Excel and flat files, the adoption
to OBI Apps can be challenging. One thing that you want to avoid at all costs is to use OBI Apps
as a data extract tool.

5. COLLABORATE 11 Copyright ©2011 by Sameer Agrawal Page 4
There is also an issue with the way IT operates in a Customer’s organization. Larger
organizations typically have decentralized IT (and even shadow IT) organizations. Traditionally
the enterprise BI organization has to play by stricter governance, security and release process
rules while the decentralized teams have more flexibility. So if you represent the enterprise IT
team and are competing with a decentralized organization, you may have a disadvantage which
can only be neutralized by strong executive sponsorship and support.
If you already have a robust functioning data warehouse, you need to definitely ask yourself:
What additional value would OBI Apps provide to our organization? It may still be necessary to
implement OBI Apps to set the foundation for a long term BI strategy, but then you need to
approach the value proposition differently.
Project Resources
There is a good reason why there is the word “Business” in BI. One obviously needs a regular set
of skilled resources including subject matter experts, business analysts, database administrators,
Informatica and OBIEE Developers, etc. But there is an additional set of folks who make a huge
difference in any OBI Apps project. These are the pilot or business super users. These are the
early adopters and the champions for your newly deployed application and will guide you
throughout the project lifecycle.
Since OBI Apps is tightly integrated with Oracle Applications like EBS and CRM, you definitely
need access to people who can influence the transaction teams or the business process owners to
quickly handle requests coming from the BI team.
Last but not the least; you also need resources that have a good understanding of the whole BI
footprint from the source transaction system to the target OBI Apps warehouse. Many projects
face challenges due to the fact that there is no one to bridge the knowledge gap between what the
Business Analysts know about your source systems and the Informatica Developers on the OBI
Apps side. As you might have seen from your experience, most Informatica developers have
little or no knowledge of your source transaction systems.
Although the individual technologies which comprise OBI Apps have been out there for some
time now, the packaged combination (OBI Apps) is not too old. Once you identify a good set of
resources to manage your environment, keep them around.
Change Management and Training
A very strong executive buy-in is critical for the success of an OBI Apps project. They ensure
continued business participation and other remove other bottlenecks that hinder the progress of
the project.
OBIA also requires a change in mindset: it strives to provide Information/ Intelligence on
demand vs. the traditional way of you calling folks for data/ report needs. Business users should
be prepared for this change in report delivery strategy.
During the development phase of the project, organize report design workshops in a working
development/ quality assurance environment. This is a novel concept as compared to doing
report mockups on white boards and documents. It helps the super users to understand how the

6. COLLABORATE 11 Copyright ©2011 by Sameer Agrawal Page 5
OBIEE front-end behaves and how the data can be optimally arranged to get the maximum
value. It also shows them the flexibility of the OBIEE report development tool.
One thing to note is that OBI Apps does not offer real time data out of the box. Users need to
understand the frequency of loads and the data is good as of what date/time. Equally important is
building trust in the BI application. Users will typically ask: How do I know if the summary
amounts add up? Are my dollars in synch with the source system? Be ready with these answers
and build some mechanism to periodically check for data consistency. The report output can still
be exported to excel but you can definitely avoid a lot of manual steps by using OBIA.
Training of business community plays an important role in the success if your project. If one of
the project objectives is to provide executive dashboards, do plan one on one sessions with them
after getting these dashboards validated by folks from their staff. You may want to have their
staff members present in that dedicated session to help ensure their support as well.
A super user led “Train-the-Trainer” approach is best. Pick at least a couple of folks (this way
you have a backup) recommended by the sponsors, business leaders who have credibility in the
organization and train them first. The idea is to make these super users self sufficient in creating
their own reports and ultimately meet the needs of the whole department/business function.
Hands-on workshops can be particularly effective towards self reliance
Initially, it can be challenging for users to understand how the data is transformed during the
ETL process. Even the terminology in the subject areas can be new. The key is to make the users
understand the process, have mappings of old vs. the new terminology (if you chose to rename
business terms) and make them comfortable.
Today, technology offers a lot of choice in creating training materials. You can create user guide
documents, videos, record webcasts, etc. You can even have separate sections by business
functions and post them on an intranet site. One to two page Cheat sheets are always a big hit
with the business community.
Post Production Support
This is a very critical area for driving the success of a project. Many BI (especially OBI Apps
implementations) projects fail because of poor user adoption which can be attributed to lack of
post production support, turnaround time for enhancements/ bugs or lack of engagement with the
business.
A responsive support staff can make a huge difference. Even just listening to the user complaints
helps, but an engagement model with effective two way communication is really required. It is
critical to stay engaged with the business community and pay particular attention to user
adoption. From a technical standpoint, you may want to monitor query performance as data
volume grows.
As users utilize the system, there will be performance issues, enhancement requests and bugs
discovered. This is very typical for any BI project. You’ll need to work with the business to
prioritize the issues, commit to resolve them, and then deliver on your commitments. Continue
with the training workshops as you add more users.
Conclusion

7. COLLABORATE 11 Copyright ©2011 by Sameer Agrawal Page 6
Today’s organizations collect and store a lot of business data. However, this data is valuable only
if it helps improve the quality of your organization’s decisions. OBI Apps allow access to data
from multiple sources across your organization; present data via intuitive, understandable
dashboards, reports, and alerts; and Deliver an enterprise view of organizational performance.
The key is to be aware of the critical risk areas covered earlier when implementing OBI Apps
and have a plan that suits your organization needs. In summary, the first OBI Apps
implementation is the start of a journey, not your final destination.

8. COLLABORATE 11 Copyright ©2011 by Sameer Agrawal Page 7
Author Biography
Sameer Agrawal is a Consulting Director at Jade Global. He has over 15 years of IT and business
experience in the Business Intelligence and Operational Reporting space. His areas of expertise
include business engagement, end-to-end project planning and delivery, post go-live
support/training and business adoption.
Prior to joining Jade Global, Sameer has worked for companies like Sun Microsystems, Wind
River Systems and Oracle Corporation.
Sameer has an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Roorkee (India) and an
MBA from Haas School of Business, Berkeley. Sameer can be reached at
sameer.agrawal@jadeglobal.com
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