Kim Smyly presented on some of the new monitoring and analytics capabilities in AWD. They now have interactive dashboards, charts and reports that link directly to the underlying transactions, and can include line of business data in the reports. Writing reports in the custom AWD BI engine has been replaced with an OEM version of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, allowing for a more flexible representation and visualization of the information, with actionable links to the processes. With interactive filtering capabilities, this also provides a search interface, such as searching for all active transactions for a specific account number.
This is pretty standard BI in terms of report and dashboard definition: quite a bit of flexibility for visualization and computation in a drag-and-drop interface, no more difficult to use than Excel tables and charts. It includes pivot tables (which you may know from Excel), which are great interactive analytical tools. I’m not sure what the legacy AWD BI looks like, but if it’s like that in most older systems (usually some ancient version of Crystal Reports), this is bound to be a huge improvement.
Line of business data can be included directly as fields in the dashboards and reports; I’m not sure of the underlying data architecture, but it appears that LOB data dimensions are defined in AWD and somehow replicated from other systems (or they are a view on those other systems); because they’re in the AWD data schema, they’re exposed for monitoring and reporting.
A number of questions from the audience on this; DST is porting over from the old to a new schema, and although they will support both for the foreseeable future, I expect that this will eventually force a migration from the old report mechanisms. It seems like the first implementation of this is not as powerful as the old custom BI (although probably significantly easier to use), so they will need to bring the functionality up to match before they can expect a mass migration.