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Investment costs for a DW in short term may look quite high, but it’s important to re-iterate that gains are much higher and it will span over many years to come. It also reduces future development cost since with DW any requested report or view could be easily facilitated. However, it is important to find right business sponsor for project. He or she needs to communicate regularly with executives to ensure that they understand value of what's being built. Business sponsors need to be decisive, take an enterprise-wide perspective and have authority to enforce their decisions.
2.4 Process
Implementation of a DW itself overlaps with some phases of above explained BI process and it’s important to note that in a process standpoint, DW falls in to first few phases of entire BI initiative. Gaining highly valuable information out of DW is latter part of BI process. This can be done in many ways. DW can be used as data repository of application servers that run decision support systems, management Information Systems, Expert systems etc., through them, intelligent information could be achieved. But one of latest strategies is to build cubes out of DW and allow users to analyze data in multiple dimensions, and also provide with powerful analytical supporting such as drill down information in to granular levels. Cube is a concept that is different to traditional relational 2-dimensional tabular view, and it has multiple dimensions, allowing a manager to analyze data based on multiple factors, and not just two factors. On other hand, it allows user to select whatever dimension he wish to choose for analyzing purposes and not be limited by one fixed view of data, which is called as slice & dice in DW terminology.
BI for a serious enterprise is not just a phase of a computerization process, but it is one of major strategies behind entire organizational drivers. Therefore management should sit down and build up a BI strategy for company and identify information they require in each business direction within enterprise. Given this, BA needs to analyze organizational data sources in order to build up most effective DW which would help strategized BI process.
2.5 High level Ideas on Implementation
At heart of data warehousing process is extract, transform, and load (ETL) process. Implementation of this merely is a technical concern but it’s a business concern to make sure it is designed in such a way that it ultimately helps to satisfy business requirements. This process is responsible for connecting to and extracting data from one or more transactional systems (source systems), transforming it according to business rules defined through business objectives, and loading it into all important data model. It is at this point where data quality should be gained. Of many responsibilities of data warehouse, ETL process represents a significant portion of all moving parts of warehousing process.
Creation of a powerful DW depends on correctness of data modeling, which is responsibility of database architect of project, but BA needs to play a pivotal role providing him with correct data sources, data requirements and most importantly business dimensions. Business Dimensional modeling is a special method used for DW projects and this normally should be carried out by BA and from there onwards technical experts should take up work. Dimensions are perspectives specific to a business that could be used for analysis purposes. As an example, for a sales database, dimensions could include Product, Time, Store, etc. Obviously these dimensions differ from one business to another and hence for each DW initiative those dimensions should be correctly identified and that could be very well done by a person who has experience in DW domain and understands business as well, making it apparent that DW BA is person responsible.
Each of identified dimensions would be turned in to a dimension table at implementation phase, and objective of above explained ETL process is to fill up these dimension tables, which in turn will be taken to level of DW after performing some more database activities based on a strong underlying data model. Implementation details are not important for a business stakeholder but being aware of high level process to this level is important so that they are also on same pitch as that of developers and can confirm that developers are actually doing what they are supposed to do and would ultimately deliver what they are supposed to deliver.
Security is also vital in this regard, since this entire effort deals with highly sensitive information and identification of access right to specific people to specific information should be correctly identified and captured at requirements analysis stage.
2.6 Advantages
There are so many advantages of BI system. More presentation of analytics directly to customer or supply chain partner will be possible. Customer scores, customer campaigns and new product bundles can all be produced from analytic structures resulting in high customer retention and creation of unique products. More collaboration within information can be achieved from effective BI. Rather than middle managers getting great reports and making their own areas look good, information will be conveyed into other functions and rapidly shared to create collaborative decisions increasing efficiency and accuracy. The return on human capital will be greatly increased. Managers at all levels will save their time on data analysis, and hence saving money for enterprise, as time of managers is equal to money in a financial perspective. Since powerful BI would enable monitoring internal processes of enterprises more closely and allow making them more efficient, overall success of organization would automatically grow. All these would help to derive a high ROI on BI together with a strong DW. It is a common experience to notice very high ROI figures on such implementations, and it is also important to note that there are many non-measurable gains whilst we consider most of measurable gains for ROI calculation. However, at a stage where it is intended to take management buy-in for BI initiative, it’s important to convert all non measurable gains in to monitory values as much as possible, for example, saving of managers time can be converted in to a monitory value using his compensation.
3 Conclusion
Looking at business arena today, irrespective of domain, competition has increased, number of challenges have grown whilst they are different and complicated. It is essential to have all IT backings with cutting-edge technologies and powerful analytical capabilities in order to achieve ultimate objectives of business. Therefore, having BI is crucial, and having DW to support process is also obviously going to be crucial.
Currently working in the business analysis area of a premier software company but Started career as a Software Engineer. Intersted in both IT and business.