Enterprise Analytics / Business Intelligence

Administrative Systems (http://as.stanford.edu ) manages Authority Manager, PeopleSoft, ReportMart 1 and 3, StanfordWho, etc etc etc (many systems). Their systems support close to 5000 users.
They are implementing a system called Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) is to be a single portal to aggregate ReportMart 1 and 3 reports and dashboards. RM3 has over 150 reports, but people do not always know how to find a report that might work for them. Sri encourages people to submit a help ticket in these instances. Also you can search the reports by keywords.
Q: If I have a RM3 request what do i do? Should I wait until OBI is rolled out?
File a help issue ticket; AS will work with central business team to evaluate request. If the issue is critical it will be addressed immediately, won't need to wait for OBI rollout to be complete.
Q: Will OBI integrate with Authority Manager?
There is a vision to integrate Authority Manager but this is not implemented. For instance, STARS has migrated to OBI already, but LBRE reports are not yet integrated
The transition to OBI will occur in several phases over multiple years. The team is currently migrating legacy reports from RM1 and 3, but all new ones are being done in OBI.
OBI will allow ad hoc reporting and dashboard creation, in all areas, not just financials or student information. As an Enterprise Data Warehouse, it will allow for connections from local databases as well. AS are working on the process, checklists, timelines, etc., to more formalize the process for these types of projects. They will work with departments who have such requests, maybe helping them to engage external consultants, to implement these integrations.
As an example: the Global Services Database is a database of global projects tracked by the controllers office. This was previously being done in Excel and SQL, but has been implemented in OBI and will be going live in a few weeks.
One issue is data definitions, for instance with an HR metrics dashboard recently created, a focus group was tasked to precisely determine the meaning of things like "headcount" to ensure everyone was using the same words to mean the same things. Following this effort, often, legacy data needs to be updated to meet the newly agreed-upon definitions.
When OBI ad hoc reports are available, each field that users can access will include meta data, so that users can understand what the data definitions are. One action item/suggestion is to publish these definitions somewhere public so that people can access this information without necessarily having OBI access.
Discussion of various levels of security, from disallowing printing from OBI, to disallowing copy/screen capture, to watermarks to prevent external photos.
Note that Chrome is not supported by OBI officially, though most of it appears to work. Latest versions of Firefox and IE are supported. Images are Flash-based, so there is no iPad support.
iStanford contains an Analytics app with interactive analyses of (publicly available) Stanford data (eg how many Olympic medals were won by Stanford students). It is powered by a product called Roambi. This will be integrated with OBI at some point (maybe late 2012).
No Android app yet!