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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.