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KPIsandScorecardsusingOBIEE11gMarkRittman,RittmanMeadConsulting

Collaborate11,Orlando,Florida,April2011

A key new feature within Oracle Business Intelligence 11g is a new product

calledOracleScorecardandStrategyManagement.ThoughlicensedseparatelytocoreOracleBusinessIntelligence11g,itsfullyintegratedwiththecorebusiness

intelligence platform and provides key new features such as scorecards, key

performance indicators and KPI watchlists. So what is Oracle Scorecard andStrategyManagement,andhowdoesitwork?

KeyPerformanceIndicators

The building blocks of Oracle 11g scorecards are key performance indicators(KPIs). KPIs are defined within the web catalog and are defined by taking a

measure,atargetmeasureandasetofthresholds,whichcanthenbeusedeither

directlyindashboards(byuseofanothernewfeaturecalledKPIWatchlists)orwithinascorecard.

To take an example, consider a situation where you have a measure calledStore Sales, which you wish to use together with another measure called

Store Sales TargettodefineaKPI.TocreatetheKPI,youfirstselectthe

twomeasuresfromtheBIServersemanticmodel,likethis:

Then, you specify the dimensionality of the KPI, by for example making it

analyzablebytwolevelsinthestorehierarchy,andtwointhetimehierarchy,likethis:

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Thevaluesusedforthesedimensionscaneitherbepinned,sothattheystaystaticforthisKPI,ortheycanbedynamic,allowingtheusertochangethemto

varytheirpointofview.Aswellasusingregularattributecolumnstodefinethese dimensions, you can also use complete hierarchies in the form of

hierarchicalcolumnsfromthesemanticmodelpresentationlayer.

Oncethedimensionalityisdefined,youthensetthethresholds.Intheexample,below,OKperformanceisdefinedasbeingwithin90%ofthethreshold,witha

warningbeingdisplayedbetween90%and70%oftarget,andamountsbelow70%aremarkedascritical.

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Onceyouvesetthisandafewotheroptions,theKPIcanbesavedtotheweb

catalog.Then,youcaneitherdisplaytheresultsoftheKPIinasimpletable,oryoucanaddthemtoaKPIWatchlist,whichcanbeaddedlikeanyotherobjectto

ausersdashboard.

ThisKPIWatchlistcanthenbeslicedanddiced,usingthepointofviewcontrols

atthetopofthewatchlist,toallowtheusertodrillintowhateverlevelofdata

theyareauthorizedtoview.

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OracleScorecards

TheScorecardpartofOracleScorecardandStrategyManagementbuildsonthis

foundationofKPIstoallowyoutodefinecomplex,multi-partstrategiesusingthemetricsinyoursemanticlayer.

Inthescorecardbelow,fourKPIshavebeenassignedintoasetofobjectives;onewhichisfinancially-focusedandaimstoimprovestoremonetaryperformance,

and another which is more stakeholder-focused and uses the results of

satisfactionsurveys.

Usingtheseobjectiveswhichareorganizedintoahierarchy,youcancreate,forexample,astrategytreediagramthatshowshoweachobjectivefeedsintothe

other. In this case of our example, our overall objective of improving store

performanceismadeupoffinancial,andnon-financial(stakeholder)objectives,eachwiththeirownsetofKPIs.

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You can set howmuch influence eachobjective has onits parent objective, sothat, for example, the non-financial KPIs carry less weight than the financial

ones. In the example above, while store sales and store margin are good andacceptable respectively, this is outweighed by the very poor staff satisfaction

scores,whichoverallcontributetoapooroverallstoreperformancescore.This

is typical of balanced scorecards, where both financial and non-financial KPIscontributetotheoverall,balancedscorefortheorganization.

You can also define cause and effect maps, showing the relationship betweenKPIsinafishbone-typeofdiagram.

Ifyoureanalyzingthescorecardandwanttoaddcommentary,theresanability

toadd annotationstoKPIs,and you can alsodrill-out fromthe scorecard into

Answerstolookatthedatainmoredetailthisisakeyfeatureoftheproductasitbringstogethertheexecutive-styleoverviewofthebusinesswiththeabilityto

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do moredirect access, and ifyou combine itwith the Action Framework,also

newwiththe11greleaseofOracleBusinessIntelligence,youcancreateaclosedloopbusinessintelligencesystem.

Summary

Organizations often use KPIs and scorecards to measure their performancetowardsanobjective,settingtargetsandthresholdstoenablethemtomeasure

progressacrosstheorganization.OracleBusinessIntelligence11ggivesyouthe

abilitytodefinetheseobjectivesandstrategieswithinyourbusinessintelligence

environment, bringing this importantmeasure of corporate performance ontothedesktopsofallofyourteam.

AbouttheAuthor

Mark Rittman is an Oracle ACE Director and co-founder of Rittman Mead

Consulting, a specialist Oracle Partner working with OraclesBI, DW and EPMproducts.MarkisanexecutivedirectorforODTUG,andwritesregularlyforthe

RittmanMeadblog,athttp://www.rittmanmead.com/blog.