| An organization needs to create a nontechnical infrastructure to prevent the BI decision-support environment from becoming as fragmented as the operational and traditional decision-support environments, from which cross-organizational questions cannot be answered . Creating this infrastructure involves cross-organizational activities such as those listed below. -
Conduct an extensive business analysis involving business people from many lines of business. During this activity, define or redefine the lost complex interrelationships among business functions and business data. -
Adopt a system of peer reviews to support cross-organizational attendance and evaluation of business analysis activities. -
Resolve age-old disputes about data definitions and domains (valid data contents). -
Standardize data names and data values to reflect true business rules and business policies. -
Get agreement from the business people on the business rules and business policies in the first place. -
Create a regular forum for business people to maintain and review the standards, business rules, and business policies on an ongoing basis. -
Over time, create one consolidated, nonredundant data architecture for the entire enterprise to reflect the complex reality of the business; that is, create an enterprise logical data model. This model documents the data inventory of an organization. It is also the primary vehicle for mapping the inventory of operational data to the inventory of BI data. -
Create a meta data repository and populate it with nonredundant meta data. -
Create an inventory of source data and map it to the applicable BI target databases. Also create an inventory of other system components , such as programs, reports , screens, and so on, thereby identifying the reusability of data and process components. -
Create and manage one expanding central staging area (per load periodicity) for the ETL processes. Do not allow independent ETL processes for each data mart solution. Enterprise infrastructure activities, technical as well as nontechnical, are strategic cross-organizational activities. A central enterprise architecture group (Figure 2.8) must manage and coordinate these activities. Many large organizations have a strategic enterprise architecture group whose charter is to integrate and manage the IT infrastructure components as assets of an organization. These infrastructure components are inventories or models of business functions, business processes, business data, meta data, applications, and other technical implementation elements. If an organization does not have an enterprise architecture group , then data administration can perform the information architecture subfunction, which includes creating and managing the enterprise logical data model and the meta data repository. If the organization has a separate meta data administration, the information architecture responsibilities would be divided between those two groups (data administration and meta data administration). Figure 2.8. Enterprise Architecture Group  |
