CHAPTER 8 Accessing Organizational Information – Data Warehouse

CHAPTER 8

Accessing Organizational Information – Data Warehouse 

History of Data Warehousing

qData warehouses extend the transformation of data into information

qIn the 1990’s executives became less concerned with the day-to-day business operations and more concerned with overall business functions

qThe data warehouse provided the ability to support decision making without disrupting the day-to-day operations 

Data Warehouse Fundamentals

qData warehouse – a logical collection of information – gathered from many different operational databases – that supports business analysis activ

ities and decision-making tasks

qThe primary purpose of a data warehouse is to aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repository for decision-making purposes

qExtraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) – a process that extracts information from internal and external databases, transforms the information using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads the information into a data warehouse

qData mart – contains a subset of data warehouse information

Multidimensional Analysis and Data Mining

qDatabases contain information in a series of two-dimensional tables

qIn a data warehouse and data mart, information is multidimensional, it contains layers of columns and rows

üDimension – a particular attribute of information

Multidimensional Analysis and Data Mining

qCube – common term for the representation of multidimensional information

qData mining – the process of analyzing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone

qTo perform data mining users need data-mining tools

ØData-mining tool – uses a variety of techniques to find patterns and relationships in large volumes of information and infers rules that predict future behavior and guide decision making

Information Cleansing or Scrubbing

qAn organization must maintain high-quality data in the data warehouse

qInformation cleansing or scrubbing – a process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete information

Contact information in an operational system

qStandardizing Customer name from Operational Systems

qInformation cleansing activities

vBusiness intelligence – information that people use to support their decision-making efforts

v

vPrinciple BI enablers include:

üTechnology

üPeople

üCulture

Technology

vEven the smallest company with BI software can do sophisticated analyses today that were unavailable to the largest organizations a generation ago.

vThe largest companies today can create enterprisewide BI systems that compute and monitor metrics on virtually every variable important for managing the company.

vHow is this possible? The answer is technology—the most significant enabler of business intelligence.

People

vUnderstanding the role of people in BI allows organizations to systematically create insight and turn these insights into actions.

vOrganizations can improve their decision making by having the right people making the decisions.

vThis usually means a manager who is in the field and close to the customer rather than an analyst rich in data but poor in experience.

Culture

vA key responsibility of executives is to shape and manage corporate culture.

vThe extent to which the BI attitude flourishes in an organization depends in large part on the organization’s culture.

Perhaps the most important step an organization can take to encourage BI is to measure the performance of the organization against a set of key indicators.