Oracle has released another interesting Podcast – this one is about how Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management can help you drive behavioural change and improvement at the same time by using metadata that actually matters.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Jacques Vigeant, Product Strategy Director for Oracle Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management and Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management (or OSSM) about this subject.
After covering the basics about what a scorecard is and how it differs from a BI system or dashboards, we went on to discuss how scorecards should traverse dimensional structures, not just go up and down the hierarchies (like a typical BI system does) but also jump from one hierarchy to another to tie important data together.
Then we got to the heart of the Podcast – metadata that really matters. Jacques told us why accountability is so important – understanding WHO is under or over performing and HOW that performance relates back to the organizational strategy is key to pushing strategy forward. It is difficult to modify behavior if accountability is not included.
Jacques further explained that traditional BI metrics are typically focused around aggregating metadata along a single hierarchy. For example, we all know intuitively that a very high attrition rate in a company can impact the profitability of the company. Traditional BI metadata focuses on aggregating metadata for HR attrition rates by HR dimensions, like attrition by department or region, but in this example, there is still a chasm between the HR data and financial data. Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management (OSSM) enables you to draw relationships between your measures that are not necessarily based on aggregate tables or dimensional hierarchies – rather by business insight. You can literally drag and drop scorecard metrics on top of each other to get a better snapshot of what is going on. Jacques provided the following example, “Let’s say my attrition metric has an impact on my employee effectiveness metric, which has an impact on employee productivity, productivity has an impact on cost, and cost has an impact on profitability. You can drag all of these metrics on top of each other to get a whole company understanding of the impact of attrition rate on profitability”. This is new insight about the relationship. Once we understand this relationship, there is now a financial basis for management to ensure that the attrition rate stays within acceptable parameters – which can lead to a change in management behavior.
How does this type of insight help? Jacques explained that OSSM provides a set of metadata that is actually captured by the user using the system, providing new business insight. As more users use the system you are gaining more and more business insight. You get a network effect of new and better business insight as more people use the scorecard tool. This is not the same kind of metadata as traditional metadata that simply describes the existing dimensions.
Near the end of the Podcast Jacques also told us more about how the use of metadata that matters (including accountability) with financial objectives and data and operational metrics and data, can all roll up into the strategy tying everything together. The ability to keep the data current enables users to get a really good picture of the state of the strategy at any time, and which elements are most important to monitor to move the strategy forward. There are really great visual diagrams within OSSM that help you to literally see what is happening.
Jacques provided other interesting examples and useful information about metadata that actually matters in scorecards and how it can help encourage organizational change during the Podcast. I encourage you to listen to the entire interview.
To hear the entire Podcast click here.
For more information about Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management (OSSM) click here.
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Enrich Your Scorecard with Metadata That Actually Matters
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