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Oracle Running Oracle BI: Mark Field Discusses Oracle's Pioneering BI Strategy

As vice president of enterprise reporting systems at Oracle, Mark Field leads the ongoing campaign to implement and optimize Oracle's own industry-leading business intelligence (BI) solutions.

With more than 80,000 employees spread over hundreds of offices around the globe, Field has a big job. In 2008, 12,500 Oracle users generated 4.5 million report queries that drew on a warehouse containing 3 terabytes of information.

We asked Field to share his insight into Oracle's approach—and what's next on his agenda.

Give us a brief history of the evolution of Oracle running Oracle BI.
The story begins in the late ’90s, when Oracle decided to bring its global operations onto a single instance of its ERP solutions. In the process, we consolidated 40 data centers into two and 65 sources of financial information into a single financial application.

However, business intelligence still existed in silos. Data definitions were not aligned, which often made it impossible to roll up results across boundaries. Excel spreadsheets were still pervasive.

What spurred the transformation?
The acquisition of Siebel was key. We decided to make Siebel Analytics (now part of Oracle Business Intelligence, Enterprise Edition Plus) the basis for our BI data warehouse. Then we launched an enterprise reporting summit with key vice presidents and reporting executives. Our goal: to approach business intelligence the same way we approached our transaction systems and processes—a single instance for BI, which in turn required alignment of data definitions and a new global data mart for the entire enterprise.

Explain the phrase "BI with a purpose." How is Oracle working toward this?
BI should not be something you do "on the side." It should be delivered to you in the context of how you do your job daily. That's why we have embedded BI reports within applications and workflow processes. And it is also why we are constantly pushing out BI to wider and wider audiences.

It also means working hard to deliver timely metrics, so that people are always aware of how they are performing relative to plans and goals. We want to show them the path they are on now, in the middle of the quarter, so they can make course corrections as soon as possible—not after the fact.

What's your most recent initiative?
In January 2009, we delivered high-availability BI. A daily data refresh has traditionally been costly and time-consuming. It has also meant that the data warehouse was not available 24/7, which is a necessity for a global company.

Our new, high-availability warehouse actually includes a primary data warehouse and a standby warehouse. When we load data into the primary warehouse, we switch all users over to the standby warehouse. We then load all the new data in the standby warehouse and use Oracle Data Guard to sync the two. So now the sun does not set on Oracle BI.

What's next on your agenda?
Now we are working on marrying natural language search with business intelligence. We have 7,000 reports built in our data warehouse, but that means it can sometimes be hard for non-expert users to find the report they need. This has the potential to open up a whole new category of BI users.

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