Business drivers to move to XI from CE10

[cmmrfrds]

My company has been using CE10 since May 2004 (upgraded from Info 7.5 and Crystal 8), we have adpated to the lost functionality and it meets our current business needs. Most of the reports access Oracle 9.2 for the data. About 3000 report instances produced monthly. About 15 Oracle materialized views to support the reporting. Oracle OLAP not implemented yet.

What were your business requirements to upgrade to XI? I appreciate your input on this topic.

 

[MJRBIM]

We haven't implemented yet...but our planned FALL 2005 migration from CE-10 (PRO) to BO-XI (PREMIUM) is being driven by our senior management's desire to implement "performance management" including dashboards and scorecards based on pre-defined targets/goals.

The fact that we haven't set any of those performance targets/goals as an organization is going to make it tough to implement, but we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

They all have been to the demos and seen the fancy XI presentation layer with the speedometers and drill-down regional maps - but I don't think anyone comprehends all the "under the hood" work (eg. Data Warehouse, OLAP cubes, ESRI intergration) that you need to do in order to make that stuff work in an organization with 70+ legacy data sets.

It will be a long, possibly painful process...but we'll get it done.

 

[mdwyer]

You could ask them what numbers they want and do a quick and dirty dev in MSPaint.

 

[cmmrfrds]

Thank you for the input mjrbim. That seems like a good situation provided you can deliver on their expectations. An involved senior executive sponsor helps to clear road blocks on any project. Is all the data needed in 1 database management system or can it be put there? What DBMS are you using?

 

[MJRBIM]

Were a "mostly" ORACLE shop, but with many different DB schemas for individual applications, PLUS some MS-SQL or leagacy DBs floating around too.

Our goal is to build an Oracle data warehouse, build some OLAP cubes off the warehouse, and base our performance analysis dashboards in BO-XI off the OLAP cube.

Like I said there are 70+ data sets that need to be rationalized into the proposed data warehouse structure, and organizational goals that need to be set and documented before we can measure our performance against them.

So far we don't really have "An involved senior executive sponsor" - just a bunch of senior people who have seen the demos and are throwing the buzzwords around in meetings.

 

[cmmrfrds]

My organizations data is in Oracle.

What is your understanding of how BO connects to Oracle OLAP cubes. Is it through regular SQL statements or is there an additional layer of software?

 

[sh4kil]

Don't use OLAP but I think you have to use the Oracle OLAP metadata bridge for BusinessObjects WebI to access Oracle OLAP cubes.

Maybe Crystal XI has some other way of accessing Oracle OLAP?

 

[MJRBIM]

BOBJ currently supports XI access to Oracle OLAP through WebIntelligence using a Universe (relational). They are investigating support for Oracle OLAP in OLAP Intelligence (formerly Crystal Analysis) and may have something later this year...but that might be part of BO-12...

 

[splitthird]

MJRBIM, presumably you are buying some performance management pieces as well as upgrading to Premium?? Premium on its own does not give you dashboards (except the "My InfoView" idea which you get with Professional anyway).

Just worried that you may be expecting it all within the premium package!

 

[MJRBIM]

splitthird, you should get a job with BOBJ's sales team...'cause that was our problem months ago...

I knew that we needed to buy BOBJ DashBoard Manager and/or some of the Performance Manager tools also - but doubt that we will be in a place to use any of them in this Financial year...so it will be a separate purchase in a different year.

That being said, some of our Senior Managers didn't understand that from the BOBJ demos they were given....

I think the "Extreme Insight" roadshow and most of the sales team does a terrible job of clearly communicating what base products and "add-ons" are being shown to senior managers. They show everything under the BO-XI banner, but it's really a portfolio of different products that you need to select from based on your business case.