Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence Wednesday, November 14, 2012 1:00 p.m. 2:40 p.m. Speaker: Ted Grable, Accounting and Budget Systems Coordinator, City of Tampa CPE Credits: 2 Hours (TB) Level: Intermediate/Advanced

Session Objectives Review Business Intelligence Objectives Business Intelligence in Government Learn about Tampa s decision to implement an incremental business intelligence solution See how a cube based financial data mart can provide immediate benefit General Discussion

Business Intelligence Text Book Definition Business intelligence (BI) is the ability of an organization to collect, maintain, and organize knowledge. This produces large amounts of information that can help develop new opportunities. Identifying these opportunities, and implementing an effective strategy, can provide a competitive market advantage and long term stability. BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics. The goal of modern business intelligence deployments is to support better business decision making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS). Source: (Rud, Olivia (2009). Business Intelligence Success Factors: Tools for Aligning Your Business in the Global Economy. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley & Sons.

What is Business Intelligence? Business Intelligence (BI) is about getting the right information, to the right decision makers, at the right time. BI is an enterprise wide platform that supports reporting, analysis and decision making. BI leads to: fact based decision making a single version of the truth BI includes reporting and analytics.

Business Intelligence Vision Improving organizations by providing business insights to all employees leading to better, faster, more relevant decisions Advanced Analytics Self Service Reporting End-User Analysis Business Performance Management Source: Microsoft Corporation

Business Intelligence Wherefore Art Thou? By Dave Melbye ERP systems have an interesting character flaw. They are very, very good at generating and storing data (just ask your IT director how his or her storage needs have changed since your ERP system went live), and not very good at all at producing information. Fact: Most governments overestimate the ability of managers and others to write their own queries or generate their own reports. Fact: Very few of the analysts and decision-makers in any given organization truly understands how data is organized, exactly where it is stored, or how to get at it. Fact: Depending on who you talk to, you will get different answers when you ask what a certain data element actually represents. The problem, in a nutshell, is how to generate value from all that data that your ERP system is happily generating.

Business Intelligence Wherefore Art Thou? By Dave Melbye Software vendors, no slouches in this area, have data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) tools that purport to solve this problem. Condensing vast amounts of data into intelligible pools of information, they also have colorful dashboards and other tools to help you focus on key indicators and measures for your organization. In other words, they can help make your multi-million dollar investment that much more valuable. And yet.we see few governments using BI tools. We are told that they are too difficult to understand, too expensive, too technically complex. They require more resources than are available for support. One IT director told me that BI would never work at his government because it would force us to know something about our data. BI tools can turn your ERP system from a great big transaction processor into a valuable decision support system. There is a business case to BI that transcends cost and complexity. If you skipped BI, go back and take a look. If you re still early in the shopping process, add it to your requirements. Source: http://gfoaconsulting.blogspot.com/2010/07/business-intelligence-wherefore-art.html

City of Tampa s Story Legacy Financial Systems date from 1999 Joint City County project to implement Oracle in April 2013 Current economic environment demand improved reporting The City consolidated financial management resources IT organization had implemented a fire dept data mart Microsoft SQL Server/Analysis infrastructure was in place IT was developing BI skills Question can the City wait for Oracle to support financial decisions or develop an incremental strategy? Support from Finance for immediate solution.

Requirement: Support Business Decision With Timely and Accurate Financial Analysis Knowledge Information Data

The Financial Data Mart Development Team Technology & Innovation Business Apps Division Security DBA Operations Server Desktop Revenue & Finance Accounting Office Budget Office

Legacy Technology

Tampa s Legacy Financial System

Limited Reporting Tools FAMIS inquiry screens FAMIS inquiry export to Excel FAMIS Mainframe System Reports via PDF. FAMIS Mainframe Report Writer Custom & Ad Hoc reports in PDF format or Delimited Text Files Excel spreadsheets using data from above sources

The Problem: Getting Information? Legacy technologies Knowledge hoarding Highly manual processes Multiple data formats Infrequent data updates Long report lead times Large data exports Multiple filter/sort iterations Lack of documentation Photo source: Intelligent Enterprise magazine for DataChannel advertisement. April 10, 2000, Volume 3, Number 6

A Solution for Today and Tomorrow ERP Project: Provide tools to support data migration and testing during Oracle implementation Future: Historical archive of FAMIS rev/exp transaction data. Today: Meet existing requirements for financial reporting and analysis. Immediate benefit and ongoing value.

The Solution: Financial Data Mart Cube Implement multidimensional data structures that enable fast access to high volumes of preaggregated data, empowering end users to gain insight into relevant data at the speed of thought. Source: Quote paraphrased from Microsoft Analysis Services Overview White Paper, Published December 2007.

How Cubes are Created The FDM By The Numbers 12 million: Transaction records in the FDM 45 minutes: Daily incremental database load Less than 1 hour: Daily cube processing 1 business day or less: Data Lag

The Solution: Financial Data Mart Cube Data Types: FAMIS Revenues, Expenditures and Appropriations Date Range FY 1999 to Present Primary Measures Appropriations (Initial and Supplemental) Actuals (Revenue and Expenditure) Encumbrances (Pre encumbrances and Encumbrances) Balances (Appropriations minus Actuals and Encumbrances) Primary Dimensions Fiscal Period Fund Grant Index Code (Cost Center) Object Organization Project Transaction Type (Document)

Financial Data Mart Reporting Options Access Cube Data Using Advanced Excel Capabilities and SQL Analysis Services Access Detailed Transaction Data Using Crystal Reports PivotTable Field List

Deployment Strategy Thorough testing and validation of financial data mart and data cubes R&F user training Cube functionality Excel Pivot Table Skills Create library of analysis templates Move Financial Data Mart into production environment (April 2011) Refine FDM Cube features for Ver 2 Roll out to departmental managers & analyst

The New Paradigm Easy access to frequently needed data Collective view of the same data for multiple users Improve analyst response time Enhance data confidence Simplify complex financial analysis with slice n dice Provide new views of existing financial information Develop skills in multi dimensional data analysis This is going to change the way people think around here. This is awesome! Kevin Wagner, Sr. Fiscal Analyst Budget Office

Requirement: Support Business Decision With Timely and Accurate Financial Analysis Knowledge Information Data

A New Dimension of Financial Reporting You re traveling through another dimension a dimension not only of Revenue and Expenses but of Appropriations. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of the imagination. That s a signpost up ahead: our next stop: the Cube Zone!

Financial Data Mart Cube PivotTable Field List

Questions Ted Grable City of Tampa Accounting & Budget Systems Coordinator 306 East Jackson Street 33602 Tampa, FL 33602 ted.grable@tampagov.net (813) 274 8180 www.tampagov.net