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A Midsummer TBMA's Dream

By Guillermo Cuadrado posted Wed February 03, 2021 01:51 AM

  
I prepared these materials for the TBMC20 hackathon. In a nutshell, I detail the issues that we as TBMAs have in finding cross-references between tables in Cost Transparency TBM Studio. My proposal entails building something similar to some reports in Value Explorer, where one could find those references, heavy-hitter functions like LookupEx, SplitEx or SumIf, etc.
 
Since I don't want to harass the community managers any further, I am reposting it here, in video format, and also as a PDF. 



The improvements that Apptio have in the pipeline are nice—like the APEX interface—but I'd also like to have some development support tools.

I encourage to "like" this post if you agree with this proposal, with whatever modifications you see fit.

P.S.
I built the screenshots with real tables in CT. I (painstakingly) added the data via copy & paste, as suggested by @Kyle Castro in a previous post in the old community. I took some liberties to show the main featu​​res.

A_Midsummer_TBMAs_Dream.pdf



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Apptio Community Member
Thu February 04, 2021 04:53 PM

@Guillermo Cuadrado This is a great idea. I've drawn a graphical version of this request the past, in 3 dimensions, but I'm not sure it's practical to implement that way. 

Imagine 3 or 4 stacked layers.
  • The top layer is your actual Cost Model with the objects, master tables and allocation lines
  • The next layer down are the Transform tables from which you generate your Master Data tables, connected to the top layer (and each other) by directional lines showing Lookup(), LookupEx(), Appends and other inter-table functions.
    • Depending on the complexity of your model, you may actually need to split that into two layers, with Appended tables in the lower layer.
    • This should be possible, as the flow must be in a single direction or you'll hit the circular reference thing.
  • The bottom layer is the tables into which data is loaded. These do not (or should not) have transform steps, and certainly not lookups.
All of this information is already in the system, and must be part of the calculation of the model, so it's (hopefully) just about working out the right way to get it to us as TBMAs. My version is probably completely impractical, and yours is much more achievable, so here's hoping!
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