Oracle BI Methodology
As Oracle’s largest consulting partner of Oracle BI Applications and EPM, BICG has also written, and continues to perfect, the methodology to successfully implement the BI Applications. We call it Methodology for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications or MOBI Applications.
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For customers who use Oracle EBS, Siebel, or PeopleSoft or JD Edwards applications, we have broken the implementation of the BI Applications into three steps. When designing a business intelligence solution, you want to start with the end in mind—except when you have the BI Applications where the end has been started for you. BICG will implement the BI Applications ‘out of the box’ first and then help develop a roadmap for configuring and deploying the BI Applications. Implementing the BI Applications first allows you to actually see your data and more effectively determine the configuration necessary to make the BI Applications work for the way you run and analyze your business.
Step 1
Every project must be properly initiated. Step 1 starts with agreement on success criteria, scope, resources, and costs and a common focus.
Almost immediately, it’s time to install the BI Applications and perform the initial configuration and data load. BICG will have already have worked with your team to ensure your environment is ready using our BI Applications Readiness Assessment document.
At this point you will see your data in the prebuilt Dashboards and Reports and you can build ad hoc reports using Answers. BICG will work with your team to review the data that loaded and determine the ‘goodness of fit’ of each Subject Area. This leads to a high level assessment of the complexity to configure the Subject Areas for your needs. This information, combined with an understanding of the priority of the business requirements will be used to develop a roadmap for configuring and implementing the BI Applications and their subject areas. Before moving on to Step 2, a scope needs to be refined. BICG finds that the most successful projects deploy a subset of subject areas in a number of iterative phases. This ensures business value is delivered quickly increasing your ROI and garnering support from key stakeholders.
Step 2
This step is about the details of your business. BICG will use their business and technical knowledge to understand: your analytical requirements that drive the reports, dashboards, and ad hoc reporting out of your data warehouse; your business processes and ERP application usage that drive the components that move and store your data. BICG will determine the detailed configurations that will make the BI Applications work for you. BICG will then design those configurations—we know exactly what needs to be changed and how to change it whether it is ETL, metadata, reports, etc.
Step 3
Now it is time to configure, test, and deploy. Configuration goes quickly when you know exactly what needs to be done. Once the configuration is complete, the unit testing is successful, and the data is reloaded, it is time for Data Validation and User Acceptance Testing. BICG can provide a Test Lead to develop and manage test cases. BICG will provide the know how to help diagnose and estimate changes that the UAT users may request now that they are exposed to a new paradigm in analytics and reporting.
Deployment is the final crucial step and then success can be officially claimed. BICG will help develop a training plan to ensure all resources from executives, to power users, to tool administrators have the knowledge to effectively use and administer the solution. BICG understands the challenges present with user adoption and can offer strategies that will ensure users make the switch.
