Cyril on Business Intelligence

New Year brings both reflection and forward thinking impulses.  On the former theme it may be interesting, Dear Reader, to consider how the fundamentals of BI design, implementation and operation have shifted these past 12 months; and what is in store for the next 12.  

Of course, center stage in 2006 was the SOA hype and its implications for BI analysts. 

You may know from my last post that I believe there are only two aspects of the SOA hype that are material to the BI designer:

• Standardised web interfaces between sub-systems, and

• A well designed, implemented and maintained data warehouse.

Re-usability isn’t going anywhere much. 

Much more interesting, judging by the pleasing reaction to my blog entry of September 28 is the sea-change wrought by the shift in emphasis from green-field to brown-field BI implementations.  This shift is inescapable as BI implementations mature.  The impact on the BI analyst, consulting and marketing scene will be huge.   

Remember the shock to IT professionals when accountants discovered Visicalc?  Anarchy set in, with multiple representations of transactions data, each with its own set of errors and bias.  Substantial, but comic, arguments raged over whose data was the right basis for analysis. 

We’re in the same situation today with data warehouse content.   The ease with which cubes are created, modified, deleted has the potential for much confusion and angst.  Reporting from cubes is also approaching anarchy in many businesses; and the common lack of understanding about the ETL mechanisms will lead to the aforementioned substantial, but comic, situations being repeated. 

Metadata documentation and repository monitoring is the new audit and information integrity imperative.  Data lineage documentation is the new key analysis tool.  We need to know where it came from, what it has been doing, and who has been looking at it.   

You may care to check out the documentation tool I’ve been developing to meet this challenge:   BI Documenter. 

Happy New Year, it is going to be interesting!