Overview

Recently some of my colleagues asked me about what kind of business functions should data warehouse support, analytical or operational?

Before I answer that question, let’s review some issues business currently is facing regarding to information requirements. Most companies have many distributed information systems and the business data are scattered everywhere. It is very hard for people to see all the transaction data about his clients at one time, one screen. Data warehouse seems is the only place where could have such detailed, cleansed, integrated and completed information. So how to leverage the existing data warehouse investment to help business to make smart, objective decisions and improve operations efficiency from both analytical and operational needs is another challenge to IT people.

Along with the growth in the use of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, the BI industry is also going through a period of significant change. BI is no longer used just for doing strategic and tactical reporting and analysis, but also for driving and optimizing daily business processes and workflows. BI is no longer nice to have but essential to business success.

Analytical Space

Traditional data warehouse usually support analytic functions, which answer following business questions: These are the typical analytical business questions usually requested by top management and business analysts. They tend to look at the business trend from high level and then drill down if needed. The BI tool in this space would support those people who manage their business in overall view and help to pinpoint certain areas for improvement. The requirement for data is more aggregated and with several years of history. The physical implementation for this need is more lean to dimensional modeling or star-join modeling.

Operational Space

There is a recent trend to use data warehouse and business intelligence technology to help improve operation efficiency for normal people like salesperson or customer service representative or even customers themselves. The requirement for data is more timely and integrated. Users of this space are looking for the integrated detailed information about certain person like a called customer or a requested client etc. They are trying to answer following type of questions. They are not interested in high level but detail and recent or most recently history transactions. People would like to use the data warehouse, which could provide such complete and integrated information to help them to make some tactic decisions. Customer services could leverage this information and suggest, recommend next steps for clients and customers. These extra services add to the service excellence and improve overall customer satisfaction rate. Compared to the analytic need, the data needed here is detailed, integrated and timely.

Usually data warehouse access design is based on the data usage and targeting to certain group of business people and their business functions. It is very hard to design a single database to accommodate both of these types of users. So is there a better way to accommodate these two different types of users without big change in your data warehouse architecture?

The answer is yes and absolutely.