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Business Intelligence (BI)

The BI Portal is a centrally managed, standardized set of reporting dashboards and analytics based on a trusted data source accessible by the university community in accordance with polices of security and privacy. The BI tool facilitates enhanced user presentation with “slice and dice” and “drill down” options built by a core IRA team working collaboratively with UTS and business analysts from Finance, Human Resources, Research Administration, and Campus Solutions and in consultation with business users and stakeholders

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Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC)

As part of McMaster’s Oracle roadmap to support PeopleSoft and Business Intelligence reporting, IRA and UTS have been partnering to migrate components of McMaster’s Oracle BI platform from local/on-premises infrastructure to Oracle Cloud infrastructure.

Overall, the look and functionality of the BI Dashboards will remain the same. While the overall impact of this change will be low for users, there are a couple items we would like to notify you about:

  1. Sign in will use your McMaster email (instead of Mac ID)
  2. Unfortunately, any saved customizations cannot be migrated to the Cloud environment, and you will need to set up and resave your customizations once we are live in the Cloud environment (June 19, 2023). We recommend creating a list of your current saved customizations, and taking screenshots if you have customized report formatting saved, to make this process easier.

Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) Training

Dashboards

The BI Portal contains multiple “dashboards” that can be broken into the following areas.

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What is Business Intelligence?

The term “business intelligence” is used broadly and has evolved today to become an umbrella term including methodologies, processes, architectures and technologies to improve decision making by using fact-based support systems. At the heart of business intelligence is the ability of an organization to collect and organize data, and access accurate and timely information (derived from the data) to make appropriate decisions that support its vision, mission and goals in an efficient manner.

In contrast to ERP systems such as Mosaic (Oracle Peoplesoft) that are primarily designed for processing operating transactions and focus on single subject area, BI systems are multi-dimensional and synthesize data from multiple subject areas to facilitate better decision making. Business intelligence is about providing better business insights from analysis based on data from multiple subject areas and is not just a tool that delivers nicer looking interfaces to operational or transactional data.