Everything Oracle

Logistics

In a large organization with a global reach there may well be thousands of business users who make regular use of OBIEE. These end users will be divided by language, by business area specialisms, and by geographic location. In addition to normal business users, there will also be “superusers” who help to train and support their colleagues in the use of OBIEE on a day-to-day basis.

So the first task is to identify the users and superusers to be trained, to divide them into groups by language, business area specialism, and location, and then to divide them into practically sized training groups at each particular location. The next task is to identify the set of individuals who will train these end users, and finally the set of individuals who will train the trainers. Clearly, these tasks will require a substantial input from HR.

Then there is the task of preparing the appropriate training materials, and familiarizing the “trainers of the trainers” with this material, followed by the task of scheduling the training sessions.

Training Course Structure

An end user training course should:

Make use of relevant business area data,

Focus on active end user participation, and

Avoid direct task imitation.

Relevant Business Area Data

It’s tempting, and it’s very much cheaper, to develop a “one size fits all” training course based on some generic everyday activity with which all course participants can be expected to be reasonably familiar – the “video store” business of Oracle’s Discoverer product may come to mind. However, your trainees uptake and their understanding of what OBIEE can do for them will be greatly enhanced if the course material is directly relevant to the business activities that they perform on a daily basis. If OBIEE is to support many business areas then you’ll need to produce a different set of training materials for each business area. Yes, it’s expensive, but it will prompt trainees to focus on key business issues, such as “How do I reproduce the set of reports that I already use with OBIEE?” And when a different report format or layout is used the trainees will be asking themselves, “Is this useful? Is it a better way of looking at the data than what I do at present?”

Active End User Participation

For each training session some conceptual material will need to be provided to put the tasks to be carried out in context, typically by way of PowerPoint slides or similar material. But training segments that involve passive, “instructor focused” exposition should be kept as short as possible – “people learn by doing, not by listening”.

Avoid Direct Task Imitation

It’s a common practice for an instructor to illustrate how to do a task, and then ask trainees to repeat the steps that he has taken. Direct task imitation leads to a poor level of uptake. The task that trainees are asked to perform should be similar but not identical to that just performed by the instructor. Unless it is a variant, trainees will not be able to distinguish between the steps that are generic to the task and those that are incidental to the particular data set that the instructor has used to illustrate the task. For example, if the instructor produces a report by navigating through an OBIEE presentation catalog, by selecting the product code and the total sales value items, and by then pressing a button to generate a report, the trainees might be asked to generate a report using the product category and the total sales quantity items – “people learn not by imitation, but by variation”.

Class Size

A class size of about 12 individuals makes for a good training course. While the class is carrying out a task, the instructor can walk around to provide assistance and clarifications to those individuals who need help. The objective is to ensure that while the weakest individuals have sufficient time and help to complete the allotted task, the strongest do not get bored by having to wait for the rest of the class to catch up. Using variant tasks helps considerably, in that those who finish early can carry out additional variants of the task that they have just completed.

Training Course Objectives

The precise objectives of a training course will depend on the background of the trainees and on the subject matter that they work with on a daily basis, but the following general objectives are well worthwhile including in your list:

Ensure early success;

Reproduce the familiar;

Provide something new and useful; and

Demonstrate the range of functionality available.

Ensure Early Success

As with any new activity, it’s important for the trainees to feel from the start that they can succeed with OBIEE. Early success will prove a powerful motivator for the rest of the training course. Fortunately, the basic functionality within OBIEE is easy to use: trainees can learn to log on, browse the available presentation items, select a subset of the items that are of interest, create and view a request based upon this subset, save the request, and then log off in a single training session. Given this basic facility with OBIEE, its ad hoc query functionality will already be fully available, even though the formatting of data will be limited to the default table view.

Reproduce the Familiar

Trainees will be familiar with a range of reports that they already use in the business area in which they work. By designing a set of training sessions that allows the trainees to reproduce these reports, you’ll be working within their comfort zone, and you’ll be demonstrating that OBIEE is a practical replacement for their current reporting regime.

Provide Something New and Useful

Moving to OBIEE will not be justified if it only reproduces what the trainees can already achieve by other means. Try to identify instances of OBIEE functionality that provide something extra that will make the trainees’ day-to-day business activities easier to manage. Guided analytics, in the form of guided navigation within dashboards or conditional requests within iBots, is a promising area. It may well be possible to automate some of the routine checking of reports for anomalies that the trainees currently have to undertake manually.

Demonstrate the Range of Functionality Available

A training course is going to cover no more than a small amount of the functionality available within OBIEE – and there is always a danger of trying to cover too much material at any one time. A good training strategy is to schedule a more advanced training course at a later date after the trainees have had at least a few months’ experience of using OBIEE on a day-to-day basis. However, even on an introductory training course it’s important to try to demonstrate the range of functionality that OBIEE has on offer. If the trainees know that certain functionality is available then they can always ask for assistance if they find they need to make use of this functionality in the future.

Business Re-engineering

The ultimate objective of OBIEE training should be very different from that of traditional end user training, the type of training that was the norm a decade ago. Traditionally, in any particular business area an organization has had a clearly specified set of reports that end users make use of in the decision making process. The specifications for these reports will have grown organically over many years, and the reports will have been carefully hand crafted by developers from the IT Department.

The key issue about ad hoc query tools, such as OBIEE, is that they don’t say, “Use these reports”; instead they say “Here is all the data relevant to the business area in which you work; make use of it as you see fit”. This increased choice in the formatting and presentation of data represents an opportunity. It makes it possible for individual managers and executives to innovate in the way they use data to support the decision making process. However, what is certain to happen if your organization is not very careful in how it makes use of OBIEE is that most of your end users, once they have been trained in how to use OBIEE, will use it to construct exactly the same reports that they are already familiar with, based on the reporting tool that they have previously used. If this happens then many of the benefits to the business of moving to OBIEE will be lost.

The first issue to confront is that an ability to innovate cannot be taught. Some end users have it, and some don’t. With the more widespread use of tools like OBIEE it’s inevitable that businesses will compete with one another for the small number of innovators in each business sector, innovators who will in turn command higher salaries than their less able colleagues. But such competition is unlikely to have much impact on the distribution of innovators within any particular organization. So what we need to ask is this: “Is there an effective way to propagate the skills that these innovators bring to bear on the decision making process throughout the organization in which they work?”

Work Profiling and Competing BI Utilities

Work Profiling

One obvious approach to distributing the benefits of innovation is to profile the way the most productive end users work, to develop BI Dashboards, Guided Navigation, and iBots that reflect what they do, and then to make these – let’s call them BI utilities – available in a shared workarea to all end users within the relevant business area. If the average end user finds these utilities more useful than their existing set of reports then they will make use of them.

Competing BI Utilities

But work profiling doesn’t incentivise the innovators to distribute their innovations – indeed, it’s quite likely that innovators will keep the most successful BI utilities to themselves. A better approach is to reward the innovators based on the extent to which their utilities are taken up and used by their colleagues. Just as organisms compete with one another to fill a particular niche, you’ll need to adjust the corporate culture so that BI utilities compete with one another to fill the niche of “most frequently used BI utility”. This might be done by allowing end users to post BI utilities that they find particularly useful to a shared workarea so that they appear on an ordered list from which they can be accessed by other end users. But, in addition, software might monitor how frequently end users made use of each BI utility, and the more frequently a utility is used the higher up the list it would be placed. Authors of high scoring BI utilities would then be rewarded by way of a bonus. This approach rewards innovators not just for their own personal productivity, but also for the extent to which they help to increase the productivity of their peers. What we are aiming for here is a “Wikipedia of business innovation”, one that encourages talented individuals to actively propagate their knowledge and techniques as widely as possible among their colleagues.

Everything Oracle

Home

Everything Oracle