CHAPTER 8: ACCESSING ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION DATA—WAREHOUSE

HISTORY OF DATA WAREHOUSING

• Data warehouses extend the transformation of data into information
• 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

DATA WAREHOUSE FUNDAMENTALS

• Data warehouse – a logical collection of information – gathered from many different operational databases – that supports business analysis activities and decision-making tasks
• The primary purpose of a data warehouse is to aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repository for decision-making purposes
• Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) – 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 mart – contains a subset of data warehouse information

MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS AND DATA MINING

Databases contain information in a series of two-dimensional tables
In a data warehouse and data mart, information is multi-dimensional; it contains layers of columns and rows

• Dimension – a particular attribute of information
• Cube – common term for the representation of multidimensional information
• Data mining – the process of analyzing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone
• To perform data mining users need data-mining tools
• Data-mining tool – uses a variety of techniques to find patterns and relationships in large volumes of information and infers rules that predict future behavior and guide decision making

INFORMATION CLEANSING OR SCRUBBING

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

• Contact information in an operational system
• Standardizing Customer name from Operational System
• Information cleansing activities
• Accurate and complete information

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

• Business intelligence – refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access, analyze data, and information to support decision making effort. 
• These systems will illustrate business intelligence in the areas of customer profiling, customer support, market research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, and inventory and distribution analysis to name a few
• Eg: Excel, Access

• Principle BI enablers include:
• Technology
• People
• Culture