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cezarovidiu

Rittman Mead Consulting - The Changing World of Business Intelligence - 0 views

  • Schema on write This is the traditional approach for Business Intelligence. A model, often dimensional, is built as part of the design process. This model is an abstraction of the complexity of the underlying systems, put in business terms. The purpose of the model is to allow the business users to interrogate the data in a way they understand.
  • The model is instantiated through physical database tables and the date is loaded through an ETL (extract, transform and load) process that takes data from one or more source systems and transforms it to fit the model, then loads it into the model.
  • The key thing is that the model is determined before the data is finally written and the users are very much guided or driven by the model in how they query the data and what results they can get from the system. The designer must anticipate the queries and requests in advance of the user asking the questions.
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  • Schema on read Schema on read works on a different principle and is more common in the Big Data world. The data is not transformed in any way when it is stored, the data store acts as a big bucket. The modelling of the data only occurs when the data is read. Map/Reduce is the clearest example, the mapping is the understanding of the data structure. Hadoop is a large distributed file system, which is very good at storing large volumes of data, this is potential. It is only the mapping of this data that provides value, this is done when the data is read, not written.
  • New World Order So whereas Business Intelligence used to always be driven by the model, the ETL process to populate the model and the reporting tool to query the model, there is now an approach where the data is collected its raw form, and advanced statistical or analytical tools are used to interrogate the data. An example of one such tool is R.
  • The driver for which approach to use is often driven by what the user wants to find out. If the question is clearly formed and the sources of data that are required to answer it well understood, for example how many units of a product have we sold, then the traditional schema on write approach is best.
cezarovidiu

Why BI projects fail -- and how to succeed instead | InfoWorld - 0 views

  • A successful initiative starts with a good strategy, and a good strategy starts with identifying the business need.
  • The balanced scorecard is one popular methodology for linking strategy, technology, and performance management. Other methodologies, such as applied information economics, combine statistical analysis, portfolio theory, and decision science in order to help firms calculate the economic value of better information. Whether you use a published methodology or develop your own approach in-house, the important point is to make sure your BI activities are keyed to generating real business value, not merely creating pretty, but useless, dashboards and reports.
  • Next, ask: What data do we wish we had and how would that lead to different decisions? The answers to these questions form top-level requirements for any BI project.
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  • Instead a team of data experts, data analysts, and business experts must come together with the right technical expertise. This usually means bringing in outside help, though that help needs to be able to talk to management and talk tech.
  • Nothing makes an IT department more nervous than asking for a feed to a key operational system. Moreover, a lot of BI tools are resource hungry. Your requirements should dictate what, how much, and how often (that is, how “real time” you need it to be) data must be fed into your data warehousing technology.
  • In other words, you need one big feed to serve all instead of hundreds of operational, system-killing little feeds that can’t be controlled easily.
  • You'll probably need more than one tool to suit all of your use cases.
  • You did your homework, identified the use cases, picked a good team, started a data integration project, and chose the right tools.
  • Now comes the hard part: changing your business and your decisions based on the data and the reports. Managers, like other human beings, resist change.
  • oreover, BI projects shouldn't have a fixed beginning and end -- this isn't a sprint to become “data driven.”
  • A process is needed
  • and find new opportunities in the data.
  • Here's the bottom line, in a handy do's-and-don'ts format: Don’t simply run a tool-choice project Do cherry-pick the right team Do integrate the data so that it can be queried performance-wise without bringing down the house Don’t merely pick a tool -- pick the right tools for all your requirements and use cases Do let the data change your decision making and the structure of your organization itself if necessary Do have a process to weed out useless analytics and find new ones
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