Technology and Innovation

Presentations from breakout sessions at Solutions 2006

2006-05-02T16:30:00.000-07:00

Presentations from the Solutions 2006 breakout sessions are now available. Find out more about the latest BI tools, technology, and more.

Digestion

2006-04-27T10:05:00.000-07:00

First, thank you for checking in on this blog. Solutions 2006 is now in the recycling bin, and I'm back in Waltham. I'm supposed to be describing technology and innovation, but at this moment I'm still digesting the energy of the conference and resetting my clock back from casino time.

In no way was I able to take a comprehensive yet useful view of the technology and innovation on view at the show. Too much to go through in addition to the other aspects of attending Solutions. I guess that's good, though.

So, I would ask that you the reader entertain this request: Please use the "Comment on this Blog" link (also under my bio) to say what you liked or didn't like about this blog. (Choice of topics, depth covered, interest in seeing any of this stuff in a blog at all, random comments, all are helpful.) We at Hyperion would like to make this really useful if it wasn't for you, and if it was that's always fun to hear too.

Cheers until next year.

SDR

2006-04-26T10:38:00.000-07:00

Sustainable Development Reporting
Thanks to the hectic pace of demonstrations and impromptu meetings, I’m rather behind on the blogging. Yesterday afternoon, I saw a theater presentation that continues the theme of using Hyperion technology for additional kinds of reporting besides typical business reporting. The topic was "Sustainable development reporting", or SDR, presented by Erik Thomsen. On the one hand, he’s my boss (full disclosure in the interests of integrity), but on the other hand his topic is a good example of the kind of thing that I’m here to talk about.

SDR is big in Europe already, even though it’s barely known in the Unites States outside of multinational corporations. Basically, it’s reporting on environmental and social impact measures as well as financial measures. It’s already required in countries like France and Denmark, and S&P incorporates available metric into their assessment of organizations. So apart from being good marketing, it’s also a regulatory requirement. Local and state governments may also use the existence of these reports as a condition to do business in an area, since it helps them feel confident that the new job-producing plant won’t be a bad neighbor.

The detailed metrics can be industry-specific, but their technical handling is similar overall to financial reporting. For example, tons of CO2 emitted, passenger-miles flown by employees, gigajoules of electricity consumed, total payroll per community, are just metrics in some unit that can be aggregated and reported on. They can be contextualized (CO2 produced per dollar of output) just like earnings per share is. Business unit consolidation to corporate level has similar characteristics to financial consolidation as well.

Some European customers are already using Hyperion Financial Management to do this work. There are capabilities that can be added to more directly support the work, which it appears Hyperion is on the path to doing. There is also a lot of relevant textual information that needs to be incorporated for which text analysis tools may be required, and this is an area of current research as well.

As far as businesses in the States are concerned, this is an innovative business requirement that is likely to be mandated, and supported by current technology as well as additional development. Hyperion customers already perform it using Hyperion software. Pretty cool, as well as the right thing to do as I see it.

One That Got Away

2006-04-25T14:50:00.000-07:00

Thanks to some faulty time management (well, engaging in the spontaneous meetings that arise at a show), I missed a talk titled "Hyperion Intelligence and Military Wargaming Analysis At Lockheed Martin’s Center for Innovation." From the description, they’re building dashboards in Hyperion Intelligence for assessing input data for, and analyzing the results of, combat simulation models. Every organization is in its own line of business, and not everyone is selling products to customers. The kinds of tools and platforms provided by Hyperion are tuned for commercial organizations, but in fact the needs of many different kinds of functional domains can be met by the same technology and same processes. If I can find the presenters and get a few minutes with them, I will.

Leverage of HFM APIs with Movaris OneClose

2006-04-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

Leverage of HFM APIs with Movaris OneClose
Spent an early morning session with a company named Movaris and some potential users. This to me is an example of customer use of technology provided by Hyperion, and as far as I’m concerned, examples of technology use are as important as descriptions of technology that can be used. Usage demonstrates actual value, after all.

Movaris OneClose supports SOX compliance and financial control automation. The goal is, in conjunction with HFM, fully automating, monitoring and controlling consolidation, tax, mgt, regulatory reports, SOX compliance, and internal controls.

Their focus is on supporting business processes (which I tend to abbreviate as BProM to distinguish it from Hyperion’s use of “BPM” and also to make it pronounceable.) They read from HFM, and combine with ‘contextual’ or ‘qualitative’ information. As shown, this includes history and remaining issues associated with the closing and reporting processes, and a number of dashboards for monitoring and drilling into their status.

From the business point of view, the problems to solve and benefits to provide are quite clear. On the technology side, OneClose uses HFM’s COM API as the integration vehicle. They’ve created a service layer in C# that runs on the HFM server which then works with their service process (that would run on a separate machine, if I have that correct.) According to Rich Clayton of Hyperion, they are actually the first ISV to leverage, essentially embed HFM as a component of their overall solutions.

Right now the COM API is used only for connecting to HFM and for extracting cell data and structural information from HFM- no writeback or process initiation is performed. While it doesn’t currently use the HFM cell status and signoff information, it’s high on the roadmap, and they made clear that they chose the COM API because it provides the ability to take large advantage of HFM.

Apart from maintaining an open connection to HFM, there isn’t any other special impact on it. They expose a web services API to allow additional integration with their product.

One thing that will be interesting to watch over time is the integration of front-end aspects as well as back-end aspects. OneClose provides a thin-client interface, as does HFM. Right now, you would be in two separate browsers to be working in both products. Regardless of who owns the web container and who is plugging into it, it seems that it’s in everyone’s interest to be able to provide single user interfaces for the integration of Hyperion app functionality with ISV-value-added functionality.

Similarly, the BPM Architect will become the origination vehicle for HFM apps over time, and being able to integrate with related deployment and management aspects of other parties’ software woukd provide value to all involved.

Tuesday Morning

2006-04-25T07:16:00.000-07:00

Day 2
So Day 1 of Solutions was all about looking at R&D Central. I didn't expect that, but in hindsight it makes sense. The only feedback I've gotten so far tells me I need to shift gears somehow. (If you have any feedback, good or bad, I appreciate it. I want to make this work for you as well!)

So I'm going to spend time today seeing what customers and partners are doing, and see what I can learn from breakout sessions as well. So many to choose from, so hard to predict what nuggets may lie within.

Again, coffee time.

Time Intelligence

2006-04-24T17:50:00.000-07:00

Time Intelligence
Time is a crucial aspect of virtually every BPM application. A number of improvements to the handling of time in Essbase applications, which should surface in version 9.3, are on display in the Time Intelligence pod in R&D Central.

Some of the improvements bring parity to ASO and BSO applications. The first few releases of ASO lacked time-balance aggregations, which are bread-and-butter for BSO. While you could use MDX to provide the same functionality, it was with more work and reduced performance. Time balance aggregation capability makes development (and migration from BSO where appropriate) simpler. In addition a new Flow aggregation allows "all-time-to-date" aggregations. (Think inventory balance aggregation based on additions and subtractions.)

Time will also be modelled as date ranges, and date will become a kind of measure value. In addition, a number of date functions (conversion to and from strings, data addition and differencing, etc.) will be provided. So you can readily retrieve or calculate based on date strings without worrying about member names, locate the month or quarter in which some date occurs and so on. In addition, lots of analyses need to derive date and date span values (days of inventory outstanding, months to pay off the loan, length of employment, etc.), so date will be a kind of measure as well that can be calculated and returned. Attributes such as holidays and weekends can be attached to dates so that ranges can include or eliminate interesting classes of dates from consideration in selections and filters.

In order to facilitate time dimension construction, a calendar generator will be provided. Calendar generation can be standard (Gregorian, ISO 8601) or customized (Fiscal-Reporting, Manufacturing) to spin specific time dimensions for the apps, in case a time dimension does not already exist. A wizard guides you through starting periods, levels to use, labeling rules, and so on.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of all this is something that I would characterize as a split view of the time dimension. Classically, a BSO application has a separate dimensions for year and period-within-year. It makes cross-tabs between years and periods easy. Many of these that have been migrated to ASO retain this characteristic. It also makes period-to-period and rolling-period calculations rather complicated. A linear view of time makes these calculations easy, but using attributes to construct a split-out year dimension doesn’t work well when a user is to view these same kinds of important calculations.

What is on tap is presenting a split view of time, so that the single linear dimension of time is apparently broken out into year and month, without impacting calculations. The internal understanding of time is as a linear dimension with various cyclic attributes, and these attributes can appear to the user as dimensions that can be placed into a cross-tab view. But regardless of the view a user is working with, time-balance functionality and time-series calculations of all stripes just work correctly without special-casing.

This is pretty cool stuff that I expect will be adopted quickly, since it allows developers to support all the good stuff of classic BSO applications and exploit all the capabilities of ASO and MDX calculations with overall less effort than before.

BPM Architect

2006-04-24T15:38:00.000-07:00

BPM Architect
Earlier, I saw the Calculation Manager component of the overall BPM Architect. I spent some time looking at the main BPM Architect booth at R&D Central, and this is what I came away with.

Companies have invested and continue to invest in master data management (MDM) in order to rationalize and allow re-use of business domains (customers, products, channels, etc.) What BPM Architect is providing is a studio-like environment for centralized development and deployment of Financial Management, Planning, and Essbase reporting applications. (The Essbase applications were characterized to me as reporting applications, while the Planning and Financial Management applications aren’t just for reporting purposes.) Maybe this is Master Application Management" (my own analogy). It surfaces libraries of dimensions and applications, from which new applications can be spun. Included (as with MDM) is the ability to subset dimensions so that different apps see their own relevant portion of the overall master data. Since applications maintain their own data storage, data synchronization jobs can be defined as well, and it maintains libraries of these as well. Basically, at least most of the tasks of defining and maintaining an app that are separate from the calculation logic portion are covered in the software shown in the BPM Architect station. Together with the Calculation Manager (which will fit in as a component of the BPM Architect), developing and maintaining apps across consolidation, planning and Essbase will get a lot easier.

The business case for this is consistent interpretations of data, increased productivity, decreased cost of application development. That seems pretty worthwhile.

SmartView, and Integrated Application Development for Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Management

2006-04-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

Well, I’ve seen two things in R& D Central worth mentioning in the space of 30 minutes. The first is upcoming enhancements to SmartView that will be available in version 9.3, and the second is the Calculation Manager that will be part of the overall BPM Architect in a later release.

SmartView
For SmartView’s part, "Linked Views" allows you to use, in a free-form way and in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint as well as in Excel, query results from Excel-based SmartView reports. Imagine (or go see for yourself) that you are preparing or reading a PowerPoint presentation or a planning document in Word, and some of the numbers in it originated in a SmartView report. You see a number of interest in there. So you right-click on it, and are quickly brought into Excel, where you see the full report there. Furthermore, the cell you’d highlighted in Word is highlighted in Excel, too. From there, you can do everything you can do in SmartView for Excel, including updating cells in the application and running a calc script (against Essbase). After updating cells, you can just refresh fields in the Word doc, and the new values are shown there.

The connection goes a little further. Basically (and I could be missing additional capabilities here), you can grab a set of cells from Excel, copy, and paste into Word or PowerPoint as fields. You can put these anywhere you want to in the text: into a table, within a paragraph, into the title or footer, and so on. This allows a very free-form consumption- essentially liberated from the data grid. And yet the fields are connected.

Works the same against Hyperion Financial Management and Hyperion Planning too.

SmartView also allows experts to enter custom MDX to go beyond what the query builder allows. (Personally, I think this is really important for exposing the MDX query capability of Essbase!)

Calculation Manager
The second thing was the Calculation Manager to be delivered with the BPM Architect. (I’m going to look at the rest of the BPM Architect later on.) I received a torrent of information on the Calculation Manager so I’ll summarize here. Basically, the Calculation Manager provides a single UI for constructing the logic of HFM and Planning applications (for example, business rules or calc scripts). It will provide a common UI for the common functionality between these two products, while allowing for product-specific capabilities to be exposed as well. There's a lot to consider:

- A visual flowchart-like designer for depicting the logic
- Product-specific or product-neutral renditions of the formulas and conditions being built.
- Common GUI for picking metadata ranges
- Rules can be shared at different scopes: within an app, between apps for a single product, with a goal of providing the ability to have rules that can be shared between products also sharable between products. (Of course, you’ll be able to see where a shared component is reused, as well, since changing it will change all uses of it.)
-You can modularize the components by packaging them as common components. These can be shared as well.
- Pre-existing calc scripts, business rules, HFM subroutines can be leverages as components as well

A business user would consider this to be a visual, approachable interface to guide them through the setup of an app. As a software developer, I’d analogize it to an IDE, but it’s far from a write-code-and-compile kind of interface.

So much more to see- I'll need to be disciplined to balance depth of discussion with ability to mention everthing worthwhile.

Plotting the Course

2006-04-24T08:04:00.000-07:00

Now that I’ve unpacked, the big question is: What am I going to write about? I have a usual personal trajectory through topics of interest, but because I’ve got (or hope to have) a few readers, I’m going to make a point of learning about as broad a range as possible. That’s a good idea anyway, and I’m glad for the impetus.

For those of you who have never been to Solutions, R&D Central is where Hyperion architects and product managers preview and demonstrate things to come. It’s a very popular stop. There are something like 26 stations at R&D Central this year with a few theater presentations as well, and it is focused on my area (technology & innovation), so I’ll be spending some time there.

But there’s more to technology and innovation than what Hyperion is doing. Innovation in particular includes using extant technology in, well, innovative ways. I’m also really interested in what customers or VARs might be doing with the technology we already provide, and hope to find something. There are something like 270 breakout sessions to pick and choose from as well, and a good number of partners and vendors that may have something interesting on this track.

Over a cup of coffee, I’ll plot my course through the show.

Technology and Innovation

2006-04-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

Technology and Innovation

With gusto, this is my first blog posting ever! I've been in the industry since 1988, presenting at or attending conferemces since DB/Expo 1991, and writing journal articles and books since that time as well, but until now I've never had occasion to blog. But I got a great invitation, so here I am.

As a Distinguished Software Engineer in the Engineering Science and Technology Group at Hyperion, I get to work on cool problems and get involved in a range of projects, but there are only so many hours in the day. Solutions 2006 will be the perfect time to check in on Hyperion and its community as a whole. I'm looking forward to capturing what I learn and my thoughts on it here and sharing them with you. In the blog environment, you get to feed back as much as you want, and any dialog we have will be great!

I'm going to focus on technology and innovation here. Tech and innovation are valuable by virtue of solving business or operational problems, so I'm going to make sure that the point of the technology is clear as well as what it is. As you know, there are a number of layers of concernes below the business requirements like "understand cash flow", "predict next year's hot markets" and "fit into our standard architecture". I can't say right now what layer(s) I'll gravitate to- I don't yet know all the things I'll get to see. (Feel free to respond to this post with specific requests!)

You may also know that I do and have done a lot of stuff with MDX, going back to some contributions to the drafting its first version. I'm going to try to hold off from undue emphasis on it and be as discreet as possible in plugging my recent book on using MDX, because as fun as MDX is, there's a lot more going on than that at Hyperion. 'Nuff said.

Time to pack.