CHAPTER 8 - ACCESSING ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION - DATA WAREHOUSE

Data warehouse extend the transformation of data into information . In the 1990's executive became less concerned with the day-to-day business operations and more concerned with overall 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 purpose

Proces :

• Extraction,transformation, and loading (ETL) - a process that extracts information from internal and external database , 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

MULTIMEDIA ANALYSIS AND DATA MINING

• Database 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  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 tools - uses a variety of techniques to find pattern and relationships in large volumes of information and infers rules that predict future behavior and guide decision making

INFORMATION CLEANING OR SCRUBBING

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

• Standardizing customers name from operational systems

• Information cleansing activities

•Information cleansing allows an organization to fix these types of inconsistencies and cleans the data in the data warehouse

• Accurate and complete information

•Why do you think most businesses cannot achieve 100% accurate and complete information?

•If they had to choose a percentage for acceptable information what would it be and why?

§Some companies are willing to go as low as 20% complete just to find business intelligence

§Few organizations will go below 50% accurate – the information is useless if it is not accurate

•Achieving perfect information is almost impossible

§The more complete and accurate an organization wants to get its information, the more it costs

§The trade off between perfect information lies in accuracy verses completeness

§Accurate information means it is correct, while complete information means there are no blanks

§Most organizations determine a percentage high enough to make good decisions at a reasonable cost, such as 85% accurate and 65% complete

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE 

- Information that people use to support their decision-making effort

Principle BI enablers include :

• Technology

Even the smallest company with BI software can do sophisticated analyses today that were unavailable to the largest organizations a generation ago. The largest companies today can create enterprise wide BI systems that compute and monitor metrics on virtually every variable important for managing the company. How is this possible? The answer is technology—the most significant enabler of business intelligence.

• People

Understanding the role of people in BI allows organizations to systematically create insight and turn these insights 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 analyst rich in data but poor in experience. In recent years “business intelligence for the masses” has been an important trend, and many organizations have made great strides in providing sophisticated yet simple analytical tools and information to a much larger user population than previously possible.

• Culture 

A key responsibility of executives 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. The actions of publishing what the organization thinks are the most important indicators, measuring these indicators, and analyzing the results to guide improvement display a strong commitment to BI throughout the organization.