Business-Focused Data Analysis

Business-Focused Data Analysis

For many organizations, the BI decision-support initiative is the first attempt to bring business data together from multiple sources in order to make it available across different departments. Organizations that use a traditional systems development methodology on their BI projects usually run into severe source data problems when they try to implement their extract/transform/load (ETL) processes because traditional development methodologies do not have steps for analyzing data domains early in the development process. They have, at best, a systems analysis phase for the application functions but no business-focused data analysis phase for the underlying data.

The business-focused data analysis step is the most critical cross-organizational step described in Business Intelligence Roadmap .

Step 5, Data Analysis, is different from a systems analysis phase in a traditional methodology. The activities traditionally performed during systems analysis are geared toward producing a design decision for the system to be built. The activities performed during data analysis are geared toward understanding and correcting the existing discrepancies in the business data, irrespective of any system design or implementation method. Data analysis is therefore a business - focused activity, not a system-focused activity.

Figure 5.1 points out that two complementary methods are required to perform rigorous data analysis:

1. Top-down logical data modeling for integration and consistency

2. Bottom-up source data analysis for standardization and quality

Figure 5.1. Complementary Data Analysis Techniques