Chapter Overview This chapter covers the following topics:
Building a BI decision-support environment is a never-ending process. Unlike most operational systems, which have sharply defined functionalities, BI applications must evolve to handle emerging information needs. As the needs and goals of your organization change, so must the BI decision-support environment. There is no practical way to anticipate all possible questions in the initial design of the BI decision-support environment or of any BI application. The best you can do at any given time is to have an environment that supports the current organizational goals and that can be easily adapted to new goals. Plan to design flexible and easy-to-change BI applications so that you have the ability to modify them when the organization's goals change. This applies to all BI initiatives, from small departmental data marts to large industrial-strength enterprise data warehouses. Be prepared to modify all BI applications and BI target databases in future releases in order to provide new query and reporting capabilities and more data. |