Kimball University’s ETL Architecture course explains ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) as being the “kitchen of data warehousing”. In other words, it is where data is cleaned and combined to make it fit for human consumption. Our experience has shown it helps if ETL Developers can get out of the kitchen and view the restaurant [...]
Agile Business Intelligence principles are based on its cornerstone of small, quick iterations focusing on value at each cycle and building quality solutions in a time-boxed way, seems to be the right fit to deliver information management solutions. However many people end up disappointed, having been given unrealistic expectations. More often than not, clients are [...]
At times implementing a data migration can feel like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Data migration is often considered as an afterthought in a program of change and frequently suffers time, budget and scope creep. Very rarely does the legacy data map exactly or neatly to the new structures. So [...]
I was recently asked to develop an Information Management Strategy business case in 5 days. Considering the client was a multi-billion dollar mining company and we only had a team of three people, it seemed like a big challenge, but we were able to leverage our past experiences and artefacts to lay out a plan [...]
Now that Master Data Management (MDM) technology has been around for nine or ten years, what is the state of play in the MDM tool market? Are they relatively mature, similar to BI or Portal technology, for example? Or are they still somewhat immature? My contention would be the latter, unfortunately. In Gartner terms they [...]
A common question arising during Data Warehouse implementations is where should business rules live in the realm of the warehouse? Suggestions may include the ETL, the semantic layer, BI objects (reports, cubes etc) or the business analyst’s temporal lobe? The latter least preferred and is easily resolved by comprehensive, accurate and complete documentation. As a [...]
In an earlier blog post Managing stakeholders in a DWBI context I wrote about some of the challenges of engaging stakeholders, in particular when dealing with data warehouse sceptics. One of the steps planned for this enterprise Data Warehouse Business Intelligence (DWBI) strategy and roadmap was a facilitated prioritisation workshop to get agreement from all [...]
I recently attended Concerto Copenhagen & Genevieve Lacey with some of Altis Consulting’s Sydney staff and spouses. It was a great evening to step away from the stresses of the end of financial year and appreciate something I cannot do. The majority of us were luddites when it comes to our playing ability but we [...]
Every data warehouse generally has at least one time dimension, and often may have multiple instances of a time dimension under the guise of role playing dimensions. Changes to data are tracked over time, either to enable reporting at a historical point in time, or to track changes to slowly changing dimensions. This is a [...]
I’ve recently been assisting a client with an enterprise DWBI strategy and roadmap to optimise and consolidate their DWBI investment across the organisation and experienced some interesting challenges in managing a very diverse group of stakeholders. Our stakeholders represented a broad cross section of the organisation with differing levels of experience in DW-BI, some with [...]
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