I had some fun times trying to get some scripts going on XI 3.1 --

 

For the BIAR comand line scripts: http://meetthetaylors.com/files/Start_BOE.cmd.txt

To wrap these in a VBS shell:

 

Dim WshShell
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WScript.Echo WshShell.CurrentDirectory
WshShell.CurrentDirectory = "C:\Program Files\Business Objects\common\4.0\java\lib\"
WScript.Echo WshShell.CurrentDirectory
WshShell.Run "java -jar biarengine.jar biar.properties"

 

For a really cool VBS editor packed with samples for just about anything: http://www.vbsedit.com/scripts/os/process/procthd/scr_992.asp
 

The critical component that links the business unit to the technical units re BI is the KPI. Proper identification and prioritisation of these metrics is key to ensuring that the focus stays where it should - on deivering usable information as opposed to gathering data and technology.

To this end there are many kpi's and metrics that are industry specific and standard to most organisations - as seen by most packaged applications these days - but there are also sites dedicated to sharing experiences and KPI's

 http://kpilibrary.com/

 

 

 

Sitting in the tech trenches we oft forget the c/overt influences of information on people and processes. We are creatures of habit, and the vastness of the web is constantly undermined by humans falling back into routine and visiting favourite sites.

Once in a while I throw a combination of unlikely terms together and do some random searching just to break the more obvious patterns of acquiring knowledge. "Business Intelligence and Empirical" soon led to

Business Intelligence meets Moral Intelligence Call for Papers for Vol. 10 (01/2009)

The paper can be accessed at the International Review of Information Ehics: http://www.i-r-i-e.net/current_issue.htm

 

Designing a dashboard is like chosing a surfboard - you want optimal performance, with the latest flow design and it must look good and be really effective.

Sometimes you don't really know what you want until you see it - so trolling online stores, visiting numerous retail shops and checking out the boards in use at your local break are par for the course until you narrow down the various choices into a suitable price range (and it must look radical! lol).

 

For dashboards the same rule applies - except most BI dpt's get tasked to emulate an excel spreadsheet that's packed with various tabs and charts etc as a starting point.

 

Look no further - this has to be the largest site of exmples - EVER http://dashboardspy.com/ - the top toolbar lists them in ranges of 1 - 250 etc until a 1000! 

It's oft said that an organization's DWH strategy either adopts Bill Inmon's Ralph Kimball's philosophy:

Bill Inmon's paradigm: Data warehouse is one part of the overall business intelligence system. An enterprise has one data warehouse, and data marts source their information from the data warehouse. In the data warehouse, information is stored in 3rd normal form.

Ralph Kimball's paradigm: Data warehouse is the conglomerate of all data marts within the enterprise. Information is always stored in the dimensional model.

There is no right or wrong between these two ideas, as they represent different data warehousing philosophies. In reality, the data warehouse in most enterprises are closer to Ralph Kimball's idea. This is because most data warehouses started out as a departmental effort, and hence they originated as a data mart. Only when more data marts are built later do they evolve into a data warehouse.

But - it is never a perfect world and the above are typically referred to as Classic Data Warehouse Architectures (CDWA) - and here is a very interesing discussion of the Data Delivery Platform (DDP) in trying to introduce versatility and reality with information delivery:

http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/9960

 

I have not had time to check out the Mondrian inclusion with the latest Pentaho suite, but there are a few additional enhacements in this area from an open source perspective:

http://freeanalysis.wordpress.com/ is an interesting concept, but I don't know of many sites that allow a myriad of technologies that would require having a generic meta data transfer mechanism. The side bar links highlight most of the more well known alternatives for OLAP technologies.

 

This space http://www.sqlsolutions.com/products/OLAPHeartbeat/index.html is always worth keeping an eye on as it offers some effective addon's to things SQL - so it's nice to see the OLAP offerings coming into play.

 

The founder of the Mondiran OLAP engine is busy running some presentations at the 2009 Pentaho Partner Summit this week - and he has a blog http://julianhyde.blogspot.com/2009/03/pentaho-partner-summit-2009.html

 

Cloud Tag: http://swik.net/OLAP

As developers and solution providers we oft forget to provide a more holistic approach to providing information in a consolidated environment.

Faced with a growing web farm of development, test and production installations - some shifting across virtual servers, I tried a number of open source collaboration installs to try and provide an information hub with updated links and documents for Business Objects XI 3.1.

After numerous attempts in trying to add a simple portal to the same Tomcat instance running on Windows 2003 for XI, I eventually settled for http://www.emforge.org/

with a link to a mindmap of all the sites links.

I included the Eclipse module for Online Business Objects Documents and am using the News tab for release announcements.