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Monday, November 10, 2008

Implementing Business Intelligence

Checklist for Implementing Business Intelligence-

If you are planning to implement a Business Intelligence solution there are a number of things to check before you decide on a solution.

1. Cost of the project: The cost of a project comprises of

(a) The cost of the product licenses.
(b) New hardware to be purchased for product installations.
(c) Any third party software to be purchased.
(d) Implementation cost including user’s trainings.
(e) Support and Maintenance cost.

It is very important to evaluate these costs before choosing a product. Certain tools may be cheap to buy but implementation and maintenance cost comes out very expensive.

2. Product’s Credibility: The product should be evaluated by considering the following-

(a) High Stability- The product should be matured enough being in the market for atleast 5 years. This is important as chances of bugs in the product are minimal, the product becomes stable. Couple of years back there were not many products in the market and the options were very less but now this is not the case.

(b) Completeness- The product should have a completeness considering all aspects of features. Some products may be very good in some aspects or features and in most of the sales demonstrations/POC’s they display those capabilities only and always try to avoid any discussion on weak points. Please ask questions as many as you can and also verify whether these capabilities/features are available out of the box functionality using wizards and drag and drop features or they just have workarounds using some code. The product should be a balanced mix of all the capabilities.

(c) Level of execution- Check whether the product can be executed for large number of users even if you have small numbers of users and how the product scales, handles high avalability, clustering environment etc.

(d) References- The product as well as the implementation partner should have good number of references where the product has been implemented sucessfully. Also check for the implementation partner's credibility, financial status and implementation capability.
---- more will follow

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Hyperion customer move to OBIEE

Hi,

I got this question from someone and I am really not getting any strong arguments for this.
The question is -
How would you convince a Hyperion customer so that he would get ready to move to OBIEE. What would be your key points?
Any suggestions?

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Hyperion Interactive Reporting Disadvantages

Hi,

You may want to read my earlier post Qlikview Vs Others


You may also be interested in similar posts.
Hyperion Interactive Reporting Enhancements-Charts

Hyperion Interactive Reporting Enhancements- Live Charts

Hyperion Interactive Reporting Tutorial

Hyperion Interactive Reporting Disadvantages

There are some points which I found Interactive reporting lacks as compared to Qlikview.
This would help users who are evaluating IR and Qlikview.

1. To create a selection box (or LOV) and link it to report objects in the dashboard, we need to write some script and cannot be done with drag and drop features. You can do this using Dashboard studio using wizards but the way you do it in Qlikview is just amaging and even users without having any knowledge of the tool can do it in few seconds. Though in version 11, Oracle has introduced some charts and slider which can be interlinked to see the data changing but needs lots of improvements. Hyperion Web Analysis has this feature present.

2. The way we can do what-if analysis in qlikview with the help of slider and variables is really quick and effective. Nothing of that sort can be done in Interactive Reporting. But the concept is IR is not made for that purpose. The way to do this is Essbase to which we cannot just compare Qlikview.

3. To create pivot reports with member showing(+) sign to further drill down and (-) sign representing the last member is not possible in IR. Qlikview can do this very well.

Manohar Rana