Day by Day: An Oracle Personal Assistant for Enterprise Analytics

You are in a hurry and away from your office desk but really need an important piece of information before your next call or meeting. If only Siri or Google Voice can help. These personal assistants can’t answer questions related to your secure enterprise data, at least not without some serious amount of programming.

Last week, Oracle released the Day by Day app for Apple and Android with the intent of making analytics on enterprise data easily accessible on the go. Oracle had previously introduced Siri-like mobile app assistants for its applications, like for Sales, however, Day by Day is the first such Oracle app that is specialized in analytics. While Day by Day is the latest BI mobile app from Oracle, it doesn’t replace the previously available Oracle BI Mobile HD App and the Synoposis App, since it serves a different purpose.

Guide to Oracle Cloud: 5 Steps to Ensure a Successful Move to the Cloud

Explore key considerations, integrating the cloud with legacy applications and challenges of current cloud implementations.

Get the Guide

I have downloaded the app on my mobile phone and connected it to Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC). So there are three main things you notice about it:

1. Personalized Experience: The app is built around you as a user. This means it integrates with your phone contacts, calls and even your location, to provide you an analytics news feed tailored to where you are and who is communicating with you through text, email or phone calls.
2. Simplicity: Its simple because there is no IT setup required. After you download and install the app from the Apple App or Google Play Store, you just need the URL to your OAC instance and your regular OAC username/password to login. When you launch the app, you will see it is a fairly simple UI. The idea is to get you answers quickly and with the least number of interactions possible.
3. Highly Collaborative: Your plane landed and you asked Day by Day a question but wanted to share that insight with a few colleagues who are all heading to the same meeting. So you simply share the visual analytics card in Day by Day with people in your phone contacts and you can also add comments into the visual. The card will then show up on your colleagues’ smart feed in Day by Day and you can all converse about it just like texting in a WhatsApp group chat.

Here are the main features worth mentioning:

• Smart Feed: This is your personally tailored analytics news feed and provides you live visual analytics (these are charts or metrics) and its simplicity makes it easy to interpret what the display shows.
• Search capability: You simply press the mic button in the app and ask a question. Or you can just type the question. Then it generates one or more analytics “cards” or visuals with relevant information presented in a few variations. For example, if you ask about “Revenue and profitability by customer in San Francisco”, it shows you a few cards for total Revenue in SF, Overall Profitability and then the same metrics by Customer on bar charts. You can then tap a chart and change the type of visual, add it to your smart feed, share it with others, or schedule it as a future notification.
• Notifications: Alerts in the past have been mostly something you setup per a predefined time schedule. However in Day by Day, in addition to scheduling the alert, you can also set it up to notify you whenever you are in a certain location, say at one of the stores you manage, or in a particular city. In addition, you can setup the notification to show up on your phone when you receive a communication (call, text or email) from one of your contacts.

Overall I wouldn’t say Day by Day is a true AI app. Not yet, but that is where Oracle seems to be heading with it in regards to enterprise analytics. One more thing is that Day by Day doesn’t work with Business Intelligence Cloud Service (the user-based subscription service) or with OBIEE (yes even 12c), so the only way it works is with an Oracle Analytics Cloud Service (OAC) subscription. More on OAC is available in my previous blog.