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Oracle® Business Intelligence Answers, Delivers, and Interactive Dashboards User Guide > Getting Started with Oracle Business Intelligence >
Overview of Oracle BI for End Users
Typically, organizations track and store large amounts of data about products, customers, prices, contacts, activities, assets, opportunities, employees, and other elements. This data is often spread across multiple databases in different locations with different versions of database software. After the data has been organized and analyzed, it can provide an organization with the metrics to measure the state of its business. This data can also present key indicators of changes in market trends and in employee, customer, and partner behavior. Oracle BI helps end users obtain, view, and analyze the data. This section contains the following topics:
Oracle BI Components
This topic provides a broad overview of Oracle BI components, from an end-user perspective. Oracle BI has two main components: - Oracle BI Presentation Services. Oracle BI Presentation Services consists of the following interfaces.
- Oracle Business Intelligence Answers. Oracle BI Answers provides answers to business questions. This interface allows users with the appropriate permissions to build and modify reports, also called requests, that let end users explore and interact with information, and present and visualize information using charts, pivot tables, and reports. Your organization may also have purchased prebuilt reports specific to your industry.
The results of an Oracle BI Answers request can be formatted, saved, organized, and shared with others. A report can be configured to refresh results in real-time.
Reports created with Oracle BI Answers can be saved in the Oracle BI Presentation Catalog and integrated into any Oracle BI home page or dashboard. Results can be enhanced through options such as charting, result layout, calculation, and drilldown features.
- Oracle Business Intelligence Interactive Dashboards. Interactive Dashboards provide points of access for analytics information. When an end user accesses Oracle BI, the user's default dashboard is typically the first page that appears. Dashboards are typically used to display reports that contain content specific to the needs of individual users or groups. Historical and current data sources can be merged into a single dashboard.
Users with the appropriate permissions can place results from Oracle BI Answers into dashboards for use by end users. Your organization may also have purchased preconfigured dashboards that contain prebuilt reports specific to your industry.
- Oracle Business Intelligence Delivers. Oracle BI Delivers is the interface used to create Oracle Business Intelligence Alerts based on analytics results. Specific results can be detected within reports and the appropriate people notified immediately through Web, wireless, and mobile communications channels.
Oracle BI Delivers uses intelligence bots called iBots to detect specific results. iBots are software-based agents, driven by schedules or events that can access, filter, and perform analytics on data based on specified criteria.
Users with the appropriate permissions can use Oracle BI Delivers to set up the conditions to trigger an alert. For example, if a user should be notified when a particular event occurs, such as customer account going critical, an alert can be created that will notify the user through a number of delivery options, such as email or cell phone.
- Oracle Business Intelligence Applications. An Oracle BI application consists of prebuilt, industry-specific Oracle BI interactive dashboards and Oracle BI reports that are built using industry best practices and address key functional areas within an organization. Dashboards and reports are tailored for each end user's role in an organization. Typically, Oracle BI applications are integrated with and accessible from other operational applications, such as Oracle's Siebel CRM applications. Oracle BI applications are integrated with operational applications to provide business metrics in reports, in context with an organization's business function and industry.
Oracle BI applications include Extract Transform Load (ETL) routines to extract, transform, and load data into the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse. Oracle BI applications also contain metadata that maps to the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse and a transactional database, and define key measures and metrics for all levels of the organization. These measures and metrics are available to report designers in Oracle BI Answers.
Some organizations may prefer to build their own metadata, Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards and Oracle BI reports. This mode is referred to as stand-alone Oracle BI.
If You Are a User of Stand-Alone Oracle BI
Stand-alone Oracle BI is not shipped with metadata, preconfigured reports, or preconfigured dashboards. Instead, an administrator in your organization uses Oracle BI to organize corporate data and create subject areas for use in building reports. Administrators also configure user security in stand-alone Oracle BI. About Security in Oracle BI
Oracle BI supports security mechanisms that allow users to access only the data for which they are authorized. The following types of security are typical: - Business logic object security. This security mechanism controls access to objects, such as subject areas, tables, and columns. For example, report designers in a particular department can view only the subject areas that belong to their department when using Oracle BI Answers.
- Presentation Catalog object security. This security mechanism provides security for objects stored in the Oracle BI Presentation Catalog, such as dashboards, dashboard pages, folders, and reports. Users can view only the objects for which they are authorized. For example, a mid-level manager may not be granted access to a dashboard containing summary information for an entire department.
- Data level security. This security mechanism controls the type and amount of data that is available in a report. When multiple users run the same report, the results that are returned to each user depend on their access rights and roles in the organization. For example, a sales vice president sees results for all regions, while a sales representative for a particular region sees only data for that region.
The security mechanisms in Oracle BI applications can use security hierarchies defined in operational applications such as Siebel CRM applications, minimizing the need for Oracle Business Intelligence administrators to manage multiple security systems. It also allows a high degree of control over access to elements in Oracle BI applications.
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