Shalini's Knowledge Share

Several questions, answers which I have not written previously, partly because I was not interested in writing what I know and what I feel, my view points.

What is the purpose of having BI – to analyse data, aggregate, slice and dice, identify trends, correspondence that will enable people to make decisions, from simple marketing decisions to corporate level decisions.

From a perspective of a software engineer, there can be just a system that they have built integrated maybe 1 or 2 other back-end systems not relevant to the scope of the software engineer. However, from an organisation\’s perspective, there are many systems each handling many processes or organisational units. When everything is combined, it is so much of data. Almost impossible for the organisational directors to make critical management decisions, or even make simple HR/marketing decisions. This is because, most of these data are only required to carry out day to day decisions and not relevant management decisions.

Why data warehouse – Answer is above. We need to take only relevant data which are needed to make the decisions, lets them slice and dice so that the users can easily access what they need without interrupting or slowing the transaction database. It has to be

Some mistakes most software companies do. Mostly they do all these 3 mistakes together; 

• They get their core software team to do the job. 
• Get the BA of the core systems to get the requirements for the BI system done for them – customer facing for a BI solution should happen from a BI consultant level to understand the customer mindset. While BAs focus on improving the existing systems using the existing data, BI Consultant is focused on using the existing data to gain insights to make decisions to the future.
• Try to get the BI systems done simultaneously with the implementation of their core functionality.

• They need to understand the business users to see what data is needed and how they have to be presented
• Deliver high quality, simple information and this simplicity should be to the level of the expertise which can be easily accessible. For example, the information required by the marketing manager to identify the market trends is different to the information required by the marketing director to talk about their sales performance to the director board.
• The warehouse needs to be updated consistently. Mostly this is done overnight so that employees see a fresh set of data when they come next morning. This can vary. For example for a hospital emergency department, they might need near real time data that might need updating every 15 minutes.