DataTerrain’s client is one of 12 Federal reserve banks and responsible for the second largest district of the Federal Reserve based on geographic area, covering 5 states and parts of 2 other states. It has nearly 2000 employees working in diverse areas like monetary policy, banking supervision, payments, and public engagement. Besides, the employees also work on supporting areas like information technology, administrative services, and financial management. The complex reporting and tracking needs of the customer were supported by Business objects on the Taleo platform. Since Oracle announced the end of support to BO after it acquired Taleo, the customer needed to convert to OBIEE.
The customer had the following key considerations for this transition project –
1. Accelerate project execution to complete the transition before BO goes out of support
2. Minimize surprises for users and assure high quality during the transition process
3. Create a report dictionary – a repository with documentation and details about each report and components for easy reference by the customer team during future maintenance and enhancement.
The customer chose DataTerrain for this project because it is an Oracle partner and had an established track record for the successful completion of comparable transition projects.The customer also wanted to benefit from DataTerrain’s domain knowledge in BO & OBIEE and competency in Taleo reporting,
DataTerrain’s accelerators enabled seamless transition
The proprietary methodology developed by DataTerrain was followed for this accelerated transition project. The major phases and highlights from each of them are summarized below –
1. Audit and analysis – DataTerrain’s automation tool was run to extract details of the AS-IS reports repository, and key information about each report. This included notes on the purpose of the report, owners, run schedules, run times, frequency of usage, unique BO features used, complex queries/functions, etc. Complexities in the BO implementation were identified for objects(dimensions and measures), classes, and joins(relationship definition) between classes. Potential transition issues were flagged and interventions were planned for specific reports as required. Redundant reports and duplicates were flagged and a plan was created for consolidation, after user review and sign-off. Improvement opportunities and performance bottlenecks were also identified for prioritizing customization efforts and issue fixes in discussion with users. Based on these, a detailed project plan was created and signed off with key stakeholders and the project sponsor.
2. Automated transition and validation – DataTerrain’s proprietary transition tool was run to transport all elements of the BO report file to OBIEE report files both in BI Publisher and Answers. The utility performed the translation for all individual elements including complex business logic embedded in the reports layer of the BO. DataTerrain SMEs(Subject Matter experts) fixed performance bottlenecks during the transition in addition to customizing reports for a few high-impact priority user requirements.As the next step, the automated utility validated the report layouts and data between the source and target systems. This improved accuracy of testing outcomes and helped to save time spent on manual quality control and assurance.The transition was pixel-perfect to preserve the significant efforts to design and develop the existing BO reports.
3. User acceptance and rollout – Since users were involved throughout the previous phases and had participated in signing-off major interim milestones, surprises and major issues were avoided during acceptance. The users also reviewed the documentation and reports dictionary created by DataTerrain SMEs by leveraging the outputs from the audit and analysis phase. The converted reports were promoted to production on time, while BO was still being supported by Oracle.
During the project closure and handover, the customer noted the following as highlights and value-adds provided by DataTerrain –
1. Accelerated project execution due to the Global Delivery model. DataTerrain had a judicious mix of team members operating onsite and from its global delivery centers. The onsite team enabled effective communication to speed up decisions. The teams in the global centers ensured that project activities continued to be executed round the clock to keep up with the tight schedule.
2. Domain knowledge and pre-built repository – DataTerrain SMEs saved time and quickly understood customer needssince they had deep domain knowledge in BO & OBIEE combined with expertise in Taleo. Their experience in developing reports in the following areas was noted by the customer – Taleo compensation cloud service, Taleo Learn cloud service, Taleo onboarding cloud service, Taleo performance management service, Taleo recruiting cloud service.
3. Accumulated knowledge and years of effort were carried forward to the OBIEE environment by retaining the look and feel of reports. This also simplified user training and the rollout could be completed smoothly with high user satisfaction.
DataTerrain ensured that the customer smoothly converted from BO to OBIEE well before Taleo BO went out of support. The improved real-time reporting and analytics capabilities of OBIEE have helped the customer improve decision making and results in its Taleo based processes.
References –
https://www.kansascityfed.org/
http://everything-oracle.com/mobieeover.htm
https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/obe/Taleo_Cloud/14B/cvn/cvn.htm
https://nerdsofobiee.wordpress.com/category/business-objects-to-obiee/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Bank_of_Kansas_City