Discovering the Business value in Business Intelligence

By Satalyst Brilliance on 23 Dec 2014

In my previous life as a provider of Analytics, Reporting and Data management I experienced first-hand the sudden surge in demand for historical, current and predictive views of business operations. I also experienced some the challenges individual teams and whole companies faced as a result of rapid business growth and through lack of co-ordination across teams. Like many companies, my previous employer lacked a strategic, cohesive approach across business units for the planning and application of Data Management, Analytics and Reporting. Some of the challenges we faced as a result included duplication or the unintentional differing application of ETL processes. For the team, this meant database refresh times were taking longer than necessary to complete. The refresh occurred every 2days, involved two ETL processes and required hundreds of transformations – typically taking up to 12 hours to complete in total without any time accounted for error handling. This meant we were only able to start querying the database mid-morning the following day and left us unable to run any scripts overnight whilst the refresh was happening. Different ETL processes also resulted in slightly different resultsets, although not a regular problem, altogether this directly impacted our ability to leverage BI in…

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