Business Intelligence Data Warehousing

Business Intelligence Data Warehousing is the process of using a data repository to enable the analysis and reporting of business data.  Through business intelligence data warehousing organizations can gain significant insight into their operations, gaining a competitive edge by understanding the key drivers that make their business operate more efficiently.  Through a properly deployed business intelligence data warehousing program you could for example gain a better understanding of what customers are key buyers of your products or services, or you could get a better view of the biggest costs that are impacting your organization.  If your business intelligence data warehousing project also has a predictive analytics component, you will also be able to build predictive profiles of your data to help you reduce key business drivers like Average Days Sales Outstanding (DSO).

A business intelligence data warehouse is crucial to decision making, because it is a single, fully integrated source of information - providing reliable, clean and consistent data that will be used to make any business decision.  A business intelligence data warehouse provides a significant amount of value to the executives of an organization and its analysts, allowing them to perform a variety of business analysis including variance analysis, budget analysis and a host of other forms. 

The business intelligence data warehouse allows a company to improve customer/vendor relationships, increase the profitability of their marketed products, generate new market entries, more effectively manage risk, and reduce costs- all of which impact the potential for higher profits of a company. In order to do this, a business intelligence data warehouse must be business focused and deliver increased functionality. At its core, a business intelligence data warehouse project is the consolidating of multiple systems that facilitates data sharing and advanced analysis options among the systems.

Why Do Business Intelligence Data Warehouses Exist?

Business intelligence data warehouse systems are created to satisfy the need for information in the modern business. With the vast amount of data most businesses have, reporting on that data can be daunting. A business intelligence data warehouse system must provide support for this reporting need by giving access to a number of queries- efficient queries, structured queries and ad hoc queries. Business intelligence data warehouse systems also allow for a wide range of flexibility, especially in terms of spreadsheet abilities, data discovery and OLAP applications.

The amount of data available to the average business is increasing each year, with some experts estimating the growth to as high as 50% per year.  While in the past business data was typically stored in a single, central system that was easily accessible to reporting, modern businesses have de-centralized data storage and the business intelligence data warehouse has become a critical component in re-centralizing the vital information needed to make better decisions.

The core concept behind business intelligence data warehousing is simple.  The idea is to create a repository of key data for the organization that is then available for company wide use for the sole purpose of creating reports, key performance indicators and predictive analysis.  The idea behind a dedicated business intelligence data warehousing repository is borne out of two critical needs: First is the need by IT to minimize the amount of reads and writes that happen to production data bases like ERP and Accounting systems.  The second is the need to only provide access to key data that is useful for reporting and analysis, rather than providing access to the vast amounts of fields and tables that most enterprise systems have available.  Through business intelligence data warehousing both the needs of IT and the needs of business managers are satisfied.

Implementing a business intelligence data warehouse comes with its own set of challenges.  Most important is to have a realistic set of expectations.  Your business intelligence data warehouse can provide a lot of insight into your business, but the business intelligence data warehouse cannot be a quick fix to a problem that may be systemic, or provide the perfect answers to your business questions.  Deploying a business intelligence data warehouse can be a daunting project and is always associated with addressing a contingency of data storage and analysis needs- not just one problem. Therefore, it’s crucial to determine the core business reason for creating the business intelligence data warehouse. This is not different than in any other major project- questions always need to be addressed before, and not after, the project is initiated.

Before your company embarks on a business intelligence data warehousing project there are a couple of key steps that need to take place.  The first is to gather information from all relevant departments on the set of business questions they want to address through the business intelligence data warehousing project.  These questions might be things like "understanding the company's average days sales outstanding" or "getting insight into who our best customers are and what they buy."  Once each department has agreed on their requirements, the next step is to identify in which systems, tables and fields the data they need resides.  Armed with this information you will now be able to build your business intelligence data warehousing application.

Once you have all the relevant information it's time to create your business intelligence data warehousing project.  The core piece of technology that you will need to complete your project is a data integration application that will allow you to map the various fields from all your in-house systems to your business intelligence data warehousing project.  Through data integration you will be able to create a central repository of key data that your business intelligence applications can now access.  The combination of this data repository and the business intelligence applications is the business intelligence data warehousing project.

As a small or mid-sized business the key question is whether business intelligence data warehousing is right for you.  With new tools available like free, open-source databases, affordable data integration platforms like EMANIO Unite! and low-cost business intelligence software like Insight!, business intelligence data warehousing is definitively within the reach of the smaller business.  With careful planning any organization can gain the benefits of business intelligence data warehousing with even modest budgets.