How ‘intelligent’ is my business?

In today’s fast paced and competitive world, making insightful decisions is very important. It is important for organisations not only to make timely decisions, but also to review and monitor the effect that decisions have on the business. In order to make strategic decisions, organisations need to rely on flexible, interoperable, and powerful business intelligence and data warehousing solutions.

Business intelligence (BI) is all about providing ‘actionable information’ at the right time to the right person, across functions and levels in an organisation. A data warehouse is, in most cases, the foundation upon which BI solutions are based.

However simply plugging in a business intelligent solution is not a guarantee that the information you obtain is enough to allow you to take a truly insightful decision or that the information is correct. Information is only as relevant as the data being fed into it!

Businesses can no longer afford to base their decision making on disparate data sources. This will only give a fragmented view of the business. A holistic view of the business is imperative and more importantly they must ensure that business intelligence and data warehouse solutions align with their organisational objectives, ensuring faster decision making and flexibility to adapt to changing business needs.

A data warehouse needs to be based on an enterprise-wide architecture design which delivers a consistent view across all areas of the organisation and that addresses the three levels in the reporting pyramid: strategic, management and operational. The architecture design has to be conducted in a way to ensure that all information delivered is relevant, accurate, consistent and timely.

There are various theories and approaches to implementing a robust data-warehouse. Kimball’s bottom up approach requires the implementation of data marts which are focused on delivering business objectives for departments in an organisation, hence providing unified views through dimensional modelling at a department level.

Although this provides a quick return on investment, it is hard to maintain and integrate at an enterprise level. Inmon’s top down approach promotes the creation of a data warehouse on a subject-by-subject area basis. Though the result is much easier to maintain and integrate, it takes too long to deliver.

Through experience we have found that the ideal approach is a hybrid of the two methods. That is harnessing the speed and user orientation of a departmental bottom-up approach with the integration and maintainability of a top-down approach, thus enabling each department to address the business needs and data quality issues within a short time frame.

From a technical aspect, in order to implement such a solution four layers are needed in the design of a solution: the operational data store layer that integrates data from multiple sources and introduces conformity; the data mart layer that is subject specific and used to facilitate strategic and tactical reporting; a reporting model layer to translate the technical jargon into business terms; and finally, the fourth and final layer is the reports, dashboards, balanced scorecards, etc.

This approach will provide a robust, holistic solution but there are additional elements that must be taken into consideration in order to ensure that the business obtains a solution that is going to deliver maximum business benefit. Involving the business users is imperative as well as recognising the importance of data quality and ensuring that required checks were made when sourcing data.

6pm is hosting a breakfast meeting to discuss the latest in BI best practices on May 12. Attendance is free but limited places are available.

Mr Barry and Mr Buttigieg are BI specialists at 6pm, a Maltese company offering flexible IT solutions. They have delivered solutions to both local and foreign clients including Symbian, Kingston Hospitals NHS Trust, Plymouth City Council, Vodafone Malta, and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

www.6pmplc.com