Integrated data warehousing enhances business intelligence (BI) by facilitating consistent and accurate reporting, while reducing data gathering and preparation time.
"Using this approach means data is extracted once - efficiently and correctly - from all the contributing transactional systems, and from transactional formats, to report efficient formats," says Martin Rennhackkamp, CIO of PBT Group, commenting on the benefits of an integrated data warehouse.
The data is integrated from multiple transactional systems, across multiple business functions, which gives a single, integrated view of the customer, the supplier, of staff members and the product.
On this note, ITWeb, in partnership with the PBT Group, is conducting an online Business Intelligence survey during October.
According to Rennhackkamp, integrated data ensures all areas of the organisation tie up and are consistent with each other."The main objectives of this business intelligence survey is to gauge organisations' appetites for engaging with the latest BI technologies, such as visualisation, in-memory databases, in-memory analytics, real-time BI, sentiment analysis, big data analytics and so forth," Rennhackkamp says.
The survey aims to gauge organisations' uptake of newer BI technologies and their maturity in adopting and deploying BI in strategic management processes. It also aims to learn how businesses use and manage information as an essential resource, as well as their response to big data (unstructured data) in the BI environment.
When asked his opinion on the factors that contribute to the success or failure of BI, Rennhackkamp says buy-in, drive and a mandate from executive management are very important, as is a knowledgeable and experienced team to implement BI.
"BI that is focused on business processes and not on individual reports or dashboards adds to BI success. Further to this, the creation, execution and tracking of a proper BI strategy and using BI to track the implementation of BI is important. Finally, a lean and mean, minimalistic BI architecture, with minimal redundancy and data duplication, aids good BI practice," he says.
"Data warehouse database technology is being used to store the data in a query- and analytics- efficient format. Also, data integration technology (often called ETL technology) is used to extract data from transactional systems, convert it to a data warehouse/BI format, and integrate it with the existing data in the data warehouse."
Rennhackkamp states that reporting and dashboarding technology presents the information to business users. And advanced analytics allows the organisation to create and run analytical models on the data, for example, for segmentation, prediction and cross-selling.
"Visualisation technology is used for exploratory data analysis, hypothesis testing, interactive information analysis and other visual applications," continues Rennhackkamp, "And many other BI-related tools are also used, such as data profiling for data quality management, metadata management tools for end-to-end data management, infrastructure management tools to manage the underlying hardware and software, as well as project management tools to manage the implementation processes, and so on."
BI business as usual?
"After a 'business as usual' period of almost 10 years, in this last year, BI has suddenly become very exciting again. Organisations have started upping the ante on what they do with data, how they use it, what tools they use to process and analyse it, and what types of decisions they make based on new categories of information," says Rennhackkamp.
Many new technologies and vendors have appeared on the scene, covering visualisation, in-memory databases, in-memory analytics, real-time BI, sentiment analysis, big data analytics and more, he notes.
"With all the change happening in the business world and in the BI technology landscape, organisations have to be more adaptable, fluid and agile in their BI implementations. Lean and efficient BI architectures are replacing archaic, multi-layer monstrosities," concludes Rennhackkamp. "Organisations are moving applications and BI solutions to the cloud to enable them to be more adaptable. There is also much more focus on efficiency (in terms of cost and processing time), as well as measuring and managing the return on investment on BI initiatives."
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