Fixing your Business Intelligence Solutions
Business intelligence (BI) is the result of leveraging software and services to transform data into actionable insights that inform an enterprise’s strategic and tactical business decisions.
BI tools analyse data sets and present findings in easy to consume visualizations: dashboards, graphs, charts, maps, reports, and summaries, to provide users with detailed intelligence about the state of the business.
Business Intelligence differs from Business Analysis in that BI is descriptive, telling you what’s happening now and what happened in the past to get to that state.
Whereas Business Analytics is predicated, that is it is prescriptive and predictive: it can tell you what to do and what’s going to happen if you do that.
Both Business intelligence and Business Analysis require the manipulation and presentation of data from multiple sources, ideally through a self-service led approach.
In order to make sound business decisions the you must trust and have faith in the sources of your data. That in turn requires:
Understanding your Meta-data
Meta-data is a set of details that define and describe the specifics about your data. They are essential to provide a true and correct understanding of your information and to provide a single meaningful source of definition of the data.
Identifying the origins of your data
You should always know where your data came from and the circumstances under which it was created. Making decisions on data with unknown origins introduces risk that needs to be eliminated.
Defining the flow and lineage of data through data mappings
Data lineage is the process of unifying and mapping data fields from a source system to their related target system and understanding any transformations that take place during the points of integration of the systems. Understanding data lineage is essential for any operational and analytical processes; data migration, data integration, BI reports, and analyses.
Conclusion
As the old adage goes “garbage-in-garbage-out” (GIGO), the cost of bad data quality can be counted in lost opportunities, bad decisions, and the time it takes to identify, cleanse, and correct erroneous data. Only by trusting your data can you apply Business intelligence (BI) to your enterprise’s strategic and tactical business decision making.
We showcased erwin Cloud Catalyst within the erwin Data Intelligence suite on our 30-minute erwin Data Intelligence demonstration.