CHAPTER EIGHT - ACCESSING ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION - DATA WAREHOUSE

Accessing Organizational Information

The company uses data warehouse information to perform the following :

Base labor budgets on actual number of guests served per hour.

Develop promotional sale item analysis to help avoid losses from overstocking or under stocking inventory.

Determine theoretical and actual cost of food and the use of ingredients.

History of Data Warehousing

In the 1990’s executives became less concerned with the day-to-day business operations and more concerned with overall business functions.

The data warehouse provided the ability to support decision making without disrupting the day-to-day operations, because:

Operational information is mainly current – does not include the history for better decision making.

Issue of quality information.

Without information history, it is difficult to tell how and why things change over time.

Data Warehouse Fundamentals

A data warehouse is a logical collection of information – gathered from many different operational databases – that supports business analysis activities and decision making tasks.

Purpose of a data warehouse is to aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repository in such way that employees can make decisions and undertake business analysis activities.

Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) is a process that extracts information from internal and external databases, transforms the information using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads the information into a data warehouse.

Data warehouse then send subsets of the information to data mart.

Data mart contains a subset of data warehouse information.

Model of Typical Data Warehouse

MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS AND DATA MINING

Relational Database contain information in a series of two-dimensional tables.

In a data warehouse and data mart, information is multidimensional, it contains layers of columns and rows.

Dimension – a particular attribute of information.

Cube – common term for the representation of multidimensional information.

Data mining is the process of analyzing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone.

Data-mining tool – uses a variety of techniques to find patterns and relationships in large volumes of information. 

INFORMATION CLEANSING OR SCRUBBING

An organization must maintain high-quality data in the data warehouse.

Information cleansing or scrubbing is a process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete information.

Occur during ETL process and second on the information once it is in the data warehouse.

Contact information in an operational system.

Standardizing Customer name from Operational Systems.

Information cleansing activities.

Accurate and complete information.

Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access, analyze data, and information to support decision making effort.

ENABLING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Competitive organizations accumulate business intelligence to gain sustainable competitive advantage, and they may regard such intelligence as a valuable core competence in some instances.

The principal BI enablers are technology, people, and culture.