Category archive for ‘Business Intelligence Architecture’ 
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Reduce Business Intelligence cost through better data migration
Managing Business Intelligence cost is not an easy task. But poorly or inconsistently structured data can make the task even harder. Unfortunately, a lazy data migration project can generate all sorts of headaches that will cause your Business Intelligence cost to explode. Of course, bad data quality also has many other costs and risks associated [...]
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Let’s admit it- centralized business intelligence alone just doesn’t work
One version of the truth. Data warehouses. Centralized business intelligence teams. This has been the best practice for business intelligence for the last two decades. Users taking the initiative with data has been seen as the enemy of a successful business intelligence program. This needs to change. In a world of ever increasing data volumes [...]
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Estimating the cost of Business Intelligence
How much does a single Business Intelligence report cost a company? Well, obviously there is no single answer- but Boris Evelson of Forrester took a shot at it recently in a blog post. Even when it's not an easy question, it is worth pursuing, and Boris lays out a useful discussion. $150 000 is the [...]
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Spreadsheet errors- Fear, uncertainty and doubt
I love the acronym FUD which stands for "Fear, uncertainty and doubt". What I don't love is the underhanded use of FUD to manipulate peoples behavior. Spreading FUD is not about creating something new, but destroying- destroying someones confidence in something, clouding the real issue, stopping a new or creative direction from being taken. FUD [...]
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Data migration- Part 1 Introduction to the data migration dilema
The world is a dynamic place. Businesses change. Companies merge, technologies shift and applications come and go. Our data, however, is often less dynamic. All those sales records in the old sales system don't morph into the format required in the shiny new ERP. The data has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the [...]
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Data to the people- why self serve ETL
As regular readers of this blog know, I believe in a balance between formal and informal data analysis tools. I believe in an approach that firmly places people in the center of a new way of looking at the data analysis process. In the past, “big business intelligence” created an infrastructure heavy, highly centralised and [...]
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Wolfram Alpha- Dimensional Generator?
Wolfram research is always doing some interesting things- and now they are aiming at providing an answer machine- they are calling it Wolfram Alpha. Its not a search engine that returns documents related to the inputed search terms- but something that computes answers to a question looking for a factual answer. This is interesting, because [...]
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Spreadmarts and Data Shadow Systems- The Debate
When business users are not getting what they want out of the enterprise business intelligence system they very rarely just give up. Successful business people didn't get where they are by giving up when someone doesn't deliver something, they take things into their own hands and get it done. Knowing this, it's not surprising that [...]
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Joining the Dimension Table to the Fact Table- Purchasing Data mart (Part 5)
After we have created the dimension tables and the fact table and populated them with data the final step to getting a star schema is of course to actually join the dimension tables to the fact table. In the datamartist tool we do this with a Join block. Check out the first four parts of [...]
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Connecting the dimension table to the fact table- Vendor Example (Part 3)
In parts one and two of this series we introduced our challenge (to make a data mart to analyze the Acme Company's spending) and showed how the Datamartist tool could import millions of rows of data and then turn it into a fact table we can use in Excel. Now we need to create a [...]
