The Business Intelligence Side of Blue Mountain RAM Bill Lucas, IT Systems Architect and Senior Software Engineer

Business Intelligence (BI) Basics  BI is an umbrella term for a variety applications  Feeds the decision making process  Maximize the value of your data  Provide evidentiary support  Only as good as the source data

Types of Applications  What’s under the BI umbrella? –Reporting –Dashboards / Visualizations –Analytics –Query / Searching –Data mining

Why BI?  There is information in your data you are not consciously tracking  Provide objective evidence to support process or schedule changes  Trend identification and analysis  Identify operational efficiencies and cost savings

BI Data Sources  Where does all that BI data come from? –OLTP databases –Data warehouses –Data marts –OLAP cubes –Flat files

Extract Transform Load

Extracting Data  Properly formatted BI data of high quality is crucial to achieving actionable results  BI data come from a number of sources and formats  Little of it is ready to consume and will need to be converted for the next step.  Data are usually moved from the source to a staging area for further scrubbing and formatting

Transforming Data  Transformation manipulates and validates the extracted data once it is in the intermediate format  Typical transformations include –Filtering –Encoding / Decoding –Calculating new values –Aggregating existing values

Loading Data  Once transforming is complete the data is moved to its target location  Data may be moved incrementally or in bulk  Data may be appended or overwritten during the load  The data load may perform additional activities like writing audit details

What’s the Result?  After ETL the data is much more usable to answer questions  Data is organized into facts and dimensions for fast retrieval –Dimensions contain the “Bys” –Facts contain the measures and details –Facts are linked to dimensions by keys  KPIs and metrics

Enterprise BI Deployment

Standalone Deployment

Standalone Deployment?  Consider a standalone deployment when: –No current BI Infrastructure –Enterprise data warehouse isn’t validated –Current BI is already in production and expensive to modify –Your company deploys BI solutions at the departmental level

Walk Through  BI home page BI home page