A decade ago, companies with thoughtful and effective data warehousing and BI strategies were relatively few and far between. But now these are firmly-established components of a company’s mature IT portfolio. Still, the fact that these are commonplace does not mean that every company successfully aligns effective DW/BI practices with their existing business and IT processes and structures.
An organisation’s leaders often miss the subtlety involved in translating business information need into digestible content, suitable for effective decision-making.
One can think of the process macroscopically as a handful of specific steps:
- Business need is articulated and clarified
- Data is identified and located
- Data is extracted and prepared for consumption
- Reporting structures are built, tested and validated, and delivered for use.
Most organisations do not have “federated” BI delivery teams (in which BI technical specialists are embedded within the various business units). For those which do, the first, second, and fourth steps fall to them, while the third step almost always involves the participation of dedicated DW resources to develop appropriate extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes and destinations for the BI specialists to leverage.
For most other organisations, which have BI and/or DW teams who are not specifically assigned to the support of individual departments, the process involves more actors and more carefully-coordinated hand offs. Often in these situations, the first step is still conducted by either an IT-savvy business person or an IT resource assigned to and familiar with the needs of the business (e.g. a unit-specific business analyst).
The second step is done by a data architect, often a member of the BI group or sometimes attached to a large DBA team, who locates the data needed to support the business request.
The third step is then accomplished by the DW or ETL technical team, who prepare the identified data and deliver it to the appropriate staging or analytics destinations. Many overlook that they must also coordinate the incremental loads and refreshes of the data with existing batch processes.
And the fourth step is often done by the BI team’s reporting tool developers, who create and populate the metadata structures and end-user reports to deliver the content, in consultation with the business analyst from the first step, who verifies the correctness and accuracy to ensure satisfaction of the original request.
In upcoming posts, we’ll explore what happens when a company has deployed “self-service” BI tools that encourage business users to design and develop their own analytics and reports.
DataHub Writer: Douglas R. Briggs
“Mr. Briggs has been active in the fields of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for the entirety of his 17-year career. He was responsible for the early adoption and promulgation of BI at one of the world’s largest consumer product companies and developed their initial BI competency center. He has consulted with numerous other companies and in regard to effective BI practices. He holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Williams College (Mass).
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