Database Reference
In-Depth Information
infrastructure and hardware that a client is using. Another consideration is the security and compliance
restrictions or licensing issues that may be required by the company or by law.
Patient records in the medical industry, for example, must be made available but also held securely. Your
ability to access these records may be severely restricted, greatly increasing the cost and difficulty of working with
this type of sensitive data. Another consideration is the accessibility of the data you need. You may encounter
situations where the data is accessible for only small windows of time. If that is the case, then you must plan
accordingly. If accessibility is sporadic, you will find it very difficult to achieve success. You need to find out about
this early on and then budget time and costs to account for this.
Another consideration is the conformity of the data. In larger companies, you may find that the same data
is recorded in a number of places within the same organization or that the same information is represented in a
number of ways. For example, if a company uses descriptors such as Good, Better, or Best for a line of products
but then attempts to record the same information in another database using the numbers 1, 2 or 3, you must get a
consensus on how this information is expected to be presented in your BI solution before you can continue. And
that takes time.
Latency issues, such as the time it takes for the data to change in one part of the organization versus the time
it shows up as information in your BI solution is another cost consideration. In projects where a large amount of
time or high degree of latency is acceptable, it is much easier to develop a cost-efficient solution. When working
with companies where only a small degree of latency can be tolerated, the development costs and urgency
required for a completed BI solution may be too exorbitant to continue with your current solution design.
Planning around these obstacles can be quite challenging and may in turn reveal other obstacles such as the
following:
•
Do the users have the skillsets to extract information from the solution you build for
them?
•
Will the solution fit the corporate culture of the company with which you are working?
•
Do you (or your team) have the skills to manage these types of complications?
As you can see, the interviewing process and taking the time to review the data in depth can determine the
success of your BI solution. Taking the time to document a plan will often bring these types of considerations to light.
Determining Your Ability to Complete the Solution
In the end, each BI solution has its own challenges and benefits. You must do your best to evaluate what these
are and realize that you will make mistakes just like every other human before you. Do not get bogged down
and frozen by indecision. Just do the best you can with the tools you have available. As with all things, your
first attempts will contain more errors than your later ones. But, if you never start because you are too afraid of
missing something, you will never become experienced enough to know how to avoid most errors. Document
your mistakes, learn from them, and move on.
One of the biggest ways to mitigate the number of mistakes you will make is to restrict the complexity of the
solution. A solution should always be as complex as it needs to be to get the information the customer needs
but as simple as you can possibly make it. The “keep it simple” rule of design will make your life easier and your
solutions more profitable.
When you find a solution that cannot be simplified enough for your team to accomplish it, you may want
to consider passing up the offer to create the solution. It may be that the solution needs a larger and more
experienced team. That may be your team in the future, but perhaps not today.
If you do decide to tackle the solution, be resigned to the fact that changes to the plan are likely. It is
imperative that you communicate these changes as they occur during the solution cycle. Communicating with
the client and managing the users' expectations are vital to the success of any BI solution. It is better to disappoint
clients expecting a particular feature at the beginning of the project than to have them wait indefinitely for the
feature to become available.
