BMI Consulting Business Intelligence Roadmap Business Analysis Requirements Subject Modeling

Understand how Requirements lead to Modeling Understand the use of Subject Models in defining warehouse architecture Know how to define a Subject Model and represent it for review BMI Consulting Objectives

BMI Consulting Context Frank Buytendijk, President of research at Gartner Inc : They (businesses) face challenges of Darwinian proportion: Adapt and learn, or die. Financial Times : Business leaders have lost their sense of direction in the face of the global economic crisis and 40 per cent are unable to pick growth opportunities for their companies. The Economist : Data, data everywhere Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into business…

BMI Consulting BI Environment

BMI Consulting Gartner's BI Framework  Make sure you have senior level business sponsorship.  Have a unified BI infrastructure.  Leverage existent wisdom and evolve your BI initiatives.

BMI Consulting BI Gartner's Best Practice  Business demands projects to be short and simple, and to have an immediate return.... BI needs to evolve but BI projects should not - they should start and stop and not evolve.  BI systems have to be developed by the IT organization with business involvement.  Consistency and accuracy of data remains the responsibility of the business departments operating the systems, not just the IT department.

BMI Consulting BI Gartner's Best Practice

Independent Data Mart - A single application data store is very specific, meeting the needs of a small range of users. BMI Consulting Developing Data Warehouse

Bus Architecture - Agreeing common standards and definitions is mandatory to this approach. BMI Consulting Developing Data Warehouse

Enterprise Data Warehouse - all data marts are dependent, derived from a central detail data warehouse. BMI Consulting Developing Data Warehouse

Starts with Requirements - business need, outputs, expectations - Indicates a scope for data required - How data should be delivered Subject Model - Begins to document understanding of data - Helps communicate the scope of the data warehouse - Provides a context for later data models BMI Consulting Planning Data Warehouse

Requirements often stated in functional form - What the delivered system must do - Who will use it - How they expected to use it - Business cases and potential ROI Include Other details - What data is required - Where it comes from - Security considerations - Source systems from which data can be extracted BMI Consulting Requirements Analysis

Data Requirements - Data content and sources - Level of detail (granularity) and data volume - History requirements - Format in which it is to be delivered We need to generalize requirements when architecting and designing a data warehouse Otherwise we risk creating an inflexible single-use data store BMI Consulting Requirements Analysis

For example - To support decision making in order to drive the growth of revenue and market shares - Do this by analyzing revenue data according to various factors (customer, product, organization, business process) - Allow time-based comparison and trend analysis over a three year period - OLAP report delivery is required … BMI Consulting Requirements Analysis-Generalizing

Further background is needed - Document the business cycle for this data, to understand how it will be recorded - Identify what data is in the operational system, how it is organized - Document how the reports/analysis will be used - Combine all the requirements together BMI Consulting Requirements Analysis-Generalizing

Why not just take everything? - Seems the safe choice… But what is “everything”? Big-bang complexity can destroy a project We need a step-by-step approach Subject Model definition is a big help - Can start from what data is needed, or what data is available - Provides a scope and context for detailed data modeling BMI Consulting Data Requirements

Why not just take everything? - Seems the safe choice… But what is “everything”? Big-bang complexity can destroy a project We need a step-by-step approach Subject Model definition is a big help - Can start from what data is needed, or what data is available - Provides a scope and context for detailed data modeling BMI Consulting Data Requirements

Provides a high level conceptual (logical) view (Major areas of interest about which an organization collects a lot of information – major business data entities) Identifies major subjects and shows relationships between subjects (Student, Instructor, Curriculum, Degree, Departments… Customer, Product, Branch, Employee …) Is enterprise-wide/broad in scope Helps confirm understanding of the business BMI Consulting Corporate Subject (Data) Model

Iterative process Involves requirements, subject-matter experts, key end-users, corporate documents, existing data models Techniques Interviews, workshops, brainstorming, ER diagrams(high-level) Maintain a business focus (top-down) BMI Consulting Identifying Subjects

The Subject List is simply a table of the identified subjects, with always: Name of subject Business description and definition Relationship to other subjects and if known Business owner, IT owner Type of subject (e.g. dimensional, measure) Any additional notes as required, e.g. subject matter experts and granularity BMI Consulting Subject List

Example: name: Customer description: Person or organization buying products from the bank related to other subjects : Product, Account business owner : Fred Smith – Finance name: Product description: Type of services sold to customers related to other subjects : Customer, Account, Employee business owner : Bill Smith – Product management name: Account description: Used to record and transfer funds for product transact. related to other subjects : Customer, Product, Branch business owner : Fred Smith – Finance BMI Consulting Subject List

A good model is easily understood Fits on one page (double-page at most) Has between 10 and 20 subjects Is described in business terms Can be clearly presented in graphical format For some examples, see WH Inmon’s web site : BMI Consulting Corporate Subject Model

BMI Consulting Meta data Definition: 1.Data about data. 2.Information about data - information that makes the data understandable, usable, and shareable. Types of meta data: 1.Business 2.Technical

BMI Consulting Business Intelligence Roadmap Business Analysis

BMI Consulting Business Analytics Analytics are used primarily to impact two main areas of any organization: Increase revenues Reduce costs Increase Revenue and/or Reduce Costs = More Profitable

BMI Consulting Business Analytics

BMI Consulting Business Analytics Linear Model Analysis Question : if there are products that are good predictors of profitability? Answer: With a 95% confidence interval, a product with a p-value of less than.05 is significant and is a good indicator of profitability.