OEID Data Provisioning
One of the most exciting aspects of the current information management revolution is business users getting faster access to wider sets of data and therefore being able to understand business events and make decisions more effectively and quicker than before.
This is happening through a number of different tools, some more aligned to Big Data, however some are more related to business enablement. One of the catch all terms used for this latter approach is Information Discovery. As the name suggests this is one area that Oracle Endeca Information Discovery (OEID) is strong.
OEID has a new feature called Data Provisioning that allows users to provide their own data as a source for reporting. Traditionally if a business user wanted to report on a new source data they would need to contact the IT function and sponsor a project or work package to bring that data into the reporting system.
Furthermore, the nature of requirements in any Business Intelligence project means that the business user cannot be sure:
- if that data does actually bring value to the organisation, or
- how to model or represent the data to get the inherent value from it.
This often leads to a disconnect between business users and their IT department, accompanied by long development times, and has given rise to a number of desktop based tools such as Qlikview, Spotfire and Tableau as business users demand to have more control over their data sources.
Data Provisioning puts control back in the hands of the business user. They can easily set up a new data source or add a data source to an existing report.
OEID’s model-less approach, combined with its easy to use, search based interface make it an ideal tool for Data Provisioning. Users will be able to either create simple reporting solutions, or data mash-ups, exploring then adding new sources as they analyse the data.
At the moment Oracle Endeca Information Discovery’s Data Provisioning capability is in its early stages. The current limitations are the only data source you can provision is a spreadsheet and data mash-ups are not yet possible. Additionally once applications are created it is not easy to refresh their data.
Future releases of Endeca are likely to address these limitations, with users being able to update data sources, plus integrate them on the fly into existing reports. Therefore giving business users the true capability of doing data mash-ups.
We will hopefully see the data sources expand with the introduction of JDBC, JSON, OBIEE and Hive some time in the near future.
If this sounds like something your organisation could benefit from, or you just want to try it out to get an idea of what this service offers, we can set up an Endeca data provisioning proof of concept for you.
We have also posted a brief YouTube video of how to get started once you have an account. More videos will follow over the next few weeks showing you how to further build our your application.
To request an account email us at info@rittmanmead.com or for more information on Endeca please go to http://www.rittmanmead.com/endeca/ and http://www.rittmanmead.com/category/oracle-endeca/.