CHAPTER 8: ACCESSING ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION –DATA WAREHOUSE

HISTORY OF DATA  WAREHOUSING

·         Data warehouse extend the transformation of data into information

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

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

DATA WAREHOUSE FUNDAMENTALS

• ·         Data warehouse – a logical collection of information – gathered from many different operational databases – that supports business analysis activities and decision- making tasks
• ·         The primary purpose of a data warehouse is to aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repository for decision making purposes
• ·         Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) – a process that extract information from internal and external databases, transforms the information using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads the information into a data warehouse
• ·         Data mart – contains a subset of data warehouse information

MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS AND DATA MINING

• ·         Databases contain information in a series of two- dimensional tables
• ·         In a data warehouse and data mart information is multidimensional, it contains layers of columns and rows

-          Dimension – a particular attribute of information

• ·             Cube – common term for the representation of multidimensional information

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

·         To perform data mining users need data-mining tools

-          Data- mining tool – uses a variety of techniques to find patterns and relationships in large volumes of behavior and guide decision making

INFORMATION CLEANSING OR SCRUBBING

• ·         An organization must maintain high- quality data in the data warehouse
• ·         Information cleansing or scrubbing – a process that weeds out and fixes or discards incorrect, or incomplete information
• ·         Contact information in an operational system

• ·         Standardizing customer name from Operational Systems

• ·         Information cleansing activities

• ·         Accurate and complete information

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

·         Information that people use to support their decision making efforts

·         Principle BI enabler:

1.       Technology

-          Even the smallest company with BI software can do sophisticated analysis today that were unavailable to largest organizations a generation ago

-          The largest companies today can create enterprise wide BI systems that can compute and monitor metrics on virtually every variable important for managing the company.

-          Technology is the most significant enabler of business intelligence.

2.       People

-          Understanding the role of people, BI allows organizations to systematically create insight and turn these insight into actions

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

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

3.       Culture

-          A key responsibility of executive is to shape and manage corporate culture.

-          The 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.