Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
team, the size of the data, or the number of users. This can help mitigate the
risk of projects not wanting assistance from the enterprise DW team. If a group
is already paying for the team, then there will be a higher level of interest in
using its services.
Pushing into the Future
Looking to the future is important to continue to push the data warehouse
forward to support the organization. The work on a data warehouse is never
done, but should become an integral part of how the company grows and
changes. The data warehousing industry itself continues to grow and change
too. There are advancements in technology and the emergence of new best
practices. This section serves as an introduction to some of these new areas that
are emerging and maturing at the time of this publication. It is not intended to
provide in-depth definitions and/or recommendations for implementation.
Embedded Business Intelligence
The concept of
embedded business intelligence
refers to use of the data warehouse
when it is embedded into other business workflow processes. This often is
done in a way that the business person or customer is not aware that the data
warehouse is part of the process. For example, a data warehouse can be used
to generate parts of a phone script to drive what questions are asked, and what
options or offers are presented to the customer. This can also be embedded
into other applications such as online ordering — for example, to suggest to a
customer ordering hiking boots that other customers who purchased hiking
boots also ordered sock liners and safari hats.
The reason that this differs from using the operational database itself for
the application is that this requires historical data, often from multiple sources
in the organization. The data warehouse is a logical source for this integrated
historical data. Several things need to be in place to enable this type of
operational business intelligence:
The data warehouse must be able to support these queries. It must contain
the data needed by the operational application and be able to provide an
acceptable level of query performance.
The operational system must be enhanced to tap into the data warehouse.
Appropriate business processes must be in place so that the business
community understands how to leverage the results that have been
embedded in their operational applications. For example, this may simply
be training about a new pop-up screen, such as how to use it and when it
can be ignored.
