Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Identifying common user requirements
for a BI system
In many cases, companies that struggle with information delivery do not have a ded-
icated reporting system or data warehouse. Instead the users have access only to
the operational reports provided by each line of business application. This is ex-
tremely troublesome for the users that want to compare information from different
systems.
As an example, think of a sales person that wants to have a report that shows the
sales pipeline, from the
Customer Relationship Management
(
CRM
) system to-
gether with the actual sales figures from the
Enterprise Resource Planning
(
ERP
)
system. Without a common reporting system the users have to combine the inform-
ation themselves with whatever tools are available to them.
Most often this tool is Microsoft Excel. While Microsoft Excel is an application that
can be used to effectively display information to the users, it is not the best system
for data integration. To perform the steps of extracting, transforming, and loading
data, from the source system, the users have to write tedious formulas and macros
to clean data, before they can start comparing the numbers and taking actual de-
cisions based on the information.
Lack of a dedicated reporting system can also cause trouble with the performance
of the
Online Transaction Processing
(
OLTP
) system. When I worked in the SQL
Server support group at Microsoft, we often had customers contacting us on per-
formance issues that they had due to the users running the heavy reports directly on
the production system.
To solve this problem, many companies invest in a dedicated reporting system or a
data warehouse. The purpose of this system is to contain a database customized for
reporting, where the data can be transformed and combined once and for all from
all source systems. The data warehouse also serves another purpose and that is to
serve as the storage of historic data.
Many companies that have invested in a common reporting database or data ware-
house still require a person with IT skills to create a report. The main reason for this
isthat theorganizations that haveinvestedinareportingsystemhavehadtheexpert
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