Modernizing Business Intelligence
A Major League Baseball team approached Trianz to transform its business intelligence (BI) capabilities. The goal was to increase data availability across its entire technology stack while reducing the barrier of entry to insight for data scientists and non-technical users. The transformational effects would reduce costs and the time, effort, and resource requirements to generate reports.
Reporting Challenges for the MLB Team
The client was using Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE), causing them to encounter significant operating expenses, high licensing costs, and resource utilization on-premises outpacing capacity. This meant that the client could not generate enough volumes of reports to meet demand. In addition, stakeholders were significantly limited by canned reports and a lack of report customization.
With the last official OBIEE release update in 2013, the platform was no longer fit for accurate BI reporting. Security was also at risk due to the software's age and the lack of modern reporting functionality.
To overcome these challenges, the MLB team required the migration of 120 reports to Looker, Google's visualized analytics and cloud-native business intelligence platform.
Assessment and Roadmap Design for Enhancing the BI Environment
The first stage of the migration process was assessing existing infrastructure and technologies before designing a roadmap to achieve the desired end state. This would involve migrating existing report templates to Looker before fully transitioning the client’s existing reporting workflows.
Trianz reviewed the OBIEE environment and identified the existing reports to be migrated. This allowed for a system compatibility assessment before documenting and preparing suitable reports for migration.
Timeline for the Assessment and Migration Process
Overall, the analysis of OBIEE and planning of the migration to Looker took one month. The assessment period was followed by a four months spent creating a semantic layer to improve autonomous data access, alongside report and dashboard creation for teams and stakeholders.
Trianz achieved these timescales using a combination of solution architects, certified Looker developers, and off-shore Looker developers.
Recreating the OBIEE Environment in Looker
Trianz created the semantic data layer to represent datasets using common business terms. This led to a unified and consolidated data view, providing the client with 360-degree enterprise visibility.
Next, Trianz recreated the OBIEE environment in Looker. This was achieved by creating Looker Looks, Dashboards, and LookML as a data modeling layer to achieve feature parity with OBIEE at lower costs while expanding data access to all business users.
Finally, our team worked with the client's data analysts and stakeholders to determine a Data Story. This combination of Looker Looks combined to form a collective dashboard and business context for analytics.
Transformational Effects and Outcomes After Looker Migration
Business intelligence (BI) became a focal point for the client, enabling a data-driven analytics strategy that became a core part of operational workflows.
Flexible, self-service Looker reports replaced rigid OBIEE reports, allowing the company to free up analysts and data scientists for more business-critical tasks.
Security risks associated with end-of-life (EOL) software were significantly reduced.
All reports in Looker can now include visualizations, improving the interpretability of complex datasets for employees and stakeholders.
Executives and C-suite have dashboards that update daily, providing a clear 360-degree overview of business operations and critical KPIs.
A new data platform environment enabled greater data usage in employee workflows.
Employees across all departments can now access insights and datasets that support their job roles. This increased workforce efficiency and decreased time to insight and action, helping data scientists, sales teams, and data analysts to do more in less time.
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