Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Oracle University have asked me to do another round of BI Masterclasses later this year, and I’m looking for some input and feedback from readers of this blog to help me decide on what I’m going to cover. This year and last, I ran about fifteen or so masterclasses around Europe and averaged about 30 or so people for each event, and I’m keen to build on this and deliver something even better later this year and next.

When I wrote the material for last year’s masterclass, OWB Paris was still in beta, Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition was only on limited release and BI Publisher was still called XML Publisher and little more than a toolkit. Now, OWB 10gR2 has been in developers’ hands for around twelve months, BI Suite Enterprise Edition is on full release on OTN and people are starting to work on projects and getting some results. As such, I think it’s fairly safe to assume most attendees will have basic familiarity with the new tools, and that we can start to move on to some of the more advanced topics.

As well, Oracle’s future direction around BI is starting to become clear, and it’s starting to become obvious that most new customer developments are going to be around the Oracle BI Suite EE and Fusion Middleware ranges of products. Certainly for now, I think the conversation has moved along from "What do BI Suite Standard and Enterprise edition do, and what do the new set of products
bring to things" to "how can I deliver next-generation BI applications based on BI Suite Enterprise Edition, integrate them with my SOA environment, link them up to my databases (whatever vendor provided them) and start making BI pervasive in the organization".

With that in mind, my thoughts on the next BI Masterclass is to focus solely on the BI Suite Enterprise Edition family of products, treat areas such as data integration, databases and OLAP in a heterogeneous way, and think about how BI links in with the organizations’ security/identity management and it’s applications. As a bonus, I’ll include something on data mining, predictive analytics and real-time decisions.

Here’s the proposed agenda:

Day 1: Building the Next-Generation BI Platform

Session 1 : Oracle BI Enterprise Edition platform overview (what’s new in 10.1.3.2, what’s coming in 11g, in context of Fusion Middleware)
Session 2 : Modelling the BI Enterprise Information Model (using BI Server to model the business layer & generate physical data model)
Session 3 : Heterogeneous ETL using Oracle Data Integrator
Session 4 : Business Intelligence & identity management (adding security to BI Server, linking in with SSO and VPD)

Day 2: Next-Generation Analytics

Session 1 : Building the Presentation Layer (advanced techniques with Dashboards, Delivers, Answers, managing the Presentation Server)
Session 2 : Oracle Discoverer interoperability with BI Suite EE (dashboards and delivers integration, migration techniques for EULs to BI EE)
Session 3 : Data Mining, Analytics and Real-Time Decision (Oracle Data Mining, analytics using BI Server, Oracle Real-Time Decisions)
Session 4 : Integrating BI into Business Processes (using Oracle BI EE with SOA, BPEL, BAM etc)

As before, it’ll be talks by me, and demonstrations of each of bits of technology - last time there were around twenty separate demos over the two days.

So, what do you think? Is this meaningful to you, or is it perhaps a bit too far out there to be relevant? I’m thinking that the real value in these sorts of events is to give people a taste of what’s coming up, and to try and make some sense of where the technology is going. I’m also keen to explore the links between BI and business processes/identity management, as I think these are going to be increasingly relevant over the next few years.

Anyway, if you’ve got any thoughts, or suggestions, let me know. I’m keen to hear if this is something that’s of interest to other people rather than me just scratching my own intellectual itch. Add a comment if you get a moment.

Posted in Seminar Series |