Introduction to Oracle BI Enterprise Edition

Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (sometimes simply referred to as Oracle Business Intelligence) provides a full range of business intelligence capabilities that allow you to:

• Collect up-to-date data from your organization

• Present the data in easy-to-understand formats (such as tables and graphs)

• Deliver data in a timely fashion to the employees in your organization

These capabilities enable your organization to make better decisions, take informed actions, and implement more-efficient business processes.

Figure 1-1 shows a dashboard that presents organizational data in easy-to-understand formats (tables, graphs, and so on).

In Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, you can work with:

• Analyses — (This area of Oracle BI EE is also known as Answers.) Analyses are queries against an organization's data that provide answers to business questions. Analyses allow you to explore and interact with information by visually presenting data in easy-to-understand formats (such as tables and graphs). You can save, organize, and share the results of analyses.

  Your organization might also have purchased prebuilt analyses specific to your industry. Prebuilt analyses can be used as purchased or modified to suit your business's information needs.

  For information on working with analyses, see Chapter 2, "Creating Analyses."

• Dashboards — (This area of Oracle BI EE is also known as Interactive Dashboards.) Dashboards provide personalized views of corporate and external information. A dashboard consists of one or more pages that contain content, such as analyses, links to web sites, Oracle BI Publisher reports, and so on. Dashboards allow you to provide end users with access to analytics information.

  Your organization might also have purchased preconfigured dashboards that contain prebuilt analyses specific to your industry.

  For information on working with dashboards, see Chapter 4, "Building and Using Dashboards."

• Filters, Selection Steps, and Prompts — Filters, selection steps, and prompts allow you to limit or specify the data that is displayed in dashboards and analyses.

  For information on working with filters and selections steps, see Chapter 5, "Filtering and Selecting Data for Analyses." For information on working with prompts, see Chapter 6, "Prompting in Dashboards and Analyses."

• Agents — (This area of Oracle BI EE is also known as Delivers.) Agents enable you to automate your business processes. You can use agents to provide event-driven alerting, scheduled content publishing, and conditional event-driven action execution. Agents can be scheduled or can be triggered by a specific condition, which enables you to deliver timely information to users.

  For information on working with agents, see Chapter 8, "Delivering Content."

• Conditions — Conditions are objects that return a single Boolean value that is based on the evaluation of an analysis or of a Key Performance Indicator (KPI). You use conditions to determine whether something is to be done, for example whether an agent is to deliver its content.

  For information on working with conditions, see Chapter 9, "Working with Conditions."

• Actions — Actions provide functionality to navigate to related content or to invoke operations, functions, or processes in external systems. You can include actions in various objects, such as analyses and dashboard pages. Actions allow users to take the proper action based on the business insight that they gained from the data that they received.

  For information on working with actions, see Chapter 10, "Working with Actions."

• Scorecards — (This area of Oracle BI EE is known as Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management). Scorecards allow you to model the objectives and initiatives that comprise your corporate strategy, evaluate their performance by assigning KPIs, and determine and display overall performance.

  For information on working with scorecards, see Chapter 12, "Scorecarding."

• Other Products — Oracle BI EE interacts in various ways with other products. For example, with Oracle Hyperion Smart View for Office, you can access and run analyses from Oracle BI EE directly within your Microsoft Office applications (that is, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint).

  For information, see "How Does Oracle BI EE Interact with Other Products?"

Note that these areas of Oracle BI EE (that is, Analyses, Agents, Dashboards, and so on) are sometimes referred to as Presentation Services.