In this digital age, data is the most valuable asset of an organization. Proper data usage can provide helpful information to a company to help its growth, predict future trends, and minimize unforeseen circumstances that can negatively affect a business.
Data warehousing and business intelligence can help companies organize, store, interpret, and visualize data. It can also help in predictive forecasting, provide valuable information through statistical analysis and machine learning for critical decision-making, and help visualize data through dashboards, charts, and graphs.
Data warehousing and business intelligence, when coupled together, can enhance business profits, productivity, and efficiency and give them a competitive advantage in the market. The data warehouse provides structured data storage, and the business intelligence system analyzes the data to provide valuable insights,
This article covers the basics of data warehousing and business intelligence, including core concepts, benefits, and best practices. It also shows how these two technologies work together to help businesses gain valuable information.
What is Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence
Data Warehousing
The data warehouse is a centralized data management system that enables data storage, analysis, and interpretation for better organizational decision-making. The data is collected through transactional and relational databases and other sources and fed into the data warehouse. It is used to structure data to facilitate the data analysis process.
The data warehouse and traditional database have many properties in common. In a database, data is usually stored for transactional purposes. On the other hand, in a data warehouse, a large amount of data is stored for analysis. The database also provides real-time data access, while in the data warehouse, the data is accessed only when required for analysis purposes.
In the data warehouse, data is stored from various sources; for example, data about employees, their salaries, working hours, and customer sales will be stored. Similarly, customer data, such as credit card information, emails, and products purchased, is stored. This data is then analyzed, for example, which employee made the maximum number of sales, returning customers to a specific employee, and the data of returning customers for a specific product. This can be valuable information for a company.
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence is the combination of technologies and processes that analyze data to generate valuable information for the business. The tools used in business intelligence use the data to provide useful insights in charts, graphs, summaries, tables, and dashboards.
The information gathered through business intelligence is based on the facts and figures gathered in the data warehouse over a considerable period.
To understand business intelligence further, we can assume a presentation given to the decision-making committee of a company. The presentation has production data, market trends, and prices in the form of a table. These numbers are valuable in terms of concrete evidence, but for future decision-making, the committee needs to add value to that data. For this purpose, the business intelligence tools are used. These tools will convert the numbers into graphs to show visually how the company performed against the market trends, the effect of prices against the current buying power of potential customer (based on their average spending), and the company’s future course.
Moreover, what are the bottlenecks in terms of supply chain, productivity, and sales statistics? This information can be extracted from the data gathered in the data warehouse over a specific time. It will eventually help the company make better decisions.
Critical Concepts in Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence
Components of data warehouse
Data sophistication involves four steps during the whole data warehousing lifecycle..
Source
Data is collected from different sources, such as Excel sheets, MySQL databases, or any other system used in your organization. It is entered by company employees or by customers. For example, if you run a chain of retail stores that work offline and online, the data is collected by your employees and customers during online shopping.
Lake / Stage Area
When the data is large enough, you want to save it somewhere more efficient and secure for ease of access and security. Here, the concept of a data lake comes into play. The data lake comprises tools such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, etc., enabling you to store data in one place with easy data retrieval.
The data collected from the source usually needs to follow proper formatting. An ETL tool is used to transfer data from the source. An ETL tool does three things: Extraction ‘E’ refers to extracting data from an external source; transform ‘T’ transforms the data into the standard format; and finally, Load’ L’ loads the data into the data warehouse
Farmhouse/ Data Warehouse
In this stage, after the data is cleared, it is stored in the data farmhouse. The data farmhouse only stores the metadata of the actual data while the actual data is sent to the mart.
Mart
The data mart organizes the data. For example, the data of a specific department is stored in one mart, which is then accessible to the allocated person. Depending on a company’s requirements, multiple data marts can be created.
Key Components of Business Intelligence
Data Sources:
Business intelligence systems gather data from different sources, such as data warehouses, spreadsheets, and external data sources.
Data Integration:
Data collected from different sources is organized in one place for proper visualization. This allows the user to analyze data more effectively.
Data Analysis:
Business Intelligence tools analyze and interpret the data to identify trends, patterns, and relationships that are either humanly impossible or take a lot of time if done manually.
Data Visualization:
Business intelligence tools allow users to see the data in presentable and meaningful visual representations such as graphs, charts, reports, and tables.
Predictive Analytics:
Another practical and powerful use of business analytics tools is to provide predictive forecasting based on the available data using machine learning and statistical techniques.
How Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Work Together
Data Warehouse and business intelligence work together to provide valuable data insights for an organization. The data from the data warehouse is fed into a business intelligence tool in a structured format. The BI tool then analyzes the big data to provide valuable information through visual graphs, reports, and dashboards.
As stated earlier, the data is stored in the data warehouse in huge quantities, is properly organized, and is considerably free from errors, which makes it more reliable. When fed to the Business Intelligence tool, that data generates valuable information.
Best Practices in Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence
Following best practices can help an organization achieve the best results when deploying a data warehousing and business intelligence system.
Objectives and requirements
Outlining the objectives and requirements of the system before starting a Business intelligence data warehousing project is very important. It helps develop the system architecture and choose the tools and technologies used.
Reliability and Diversity of Data Source
To get valuable results from a system, the data fed to it must be gathered from different sources and reliable. For example, in marketing, a company should collect data from its sales points, surveys, and customer relationship management systems directly from the customer relationship department and the social media marketing team. In this way, more data can be collected from different sources.
Use of Tools and Technology
Many tools are available in the market for data warehouse and business intelligence. It is vital to choose the right tools for your business. Each business has its specific requirements. For example, a healthcare facility will have a lot of patient data. The organization might need information like the monthly patient intake, frequency of a specific disease in the patients, average patient retention time in the hospital, average age of patients visiting, most occurring disease within a particular age, etc. On the other hand, an iron production company needs production data from its different processes, monthly production reports, raw material intakes, and the efficiency of each method.
So, every organization has different needs, and proper tools should be used according to their requirements.
Data Governance and Management Policy
The quality of the data fed into the system is very important for reliable outcomes. A company should create a data governance and management policy to keep it reliable and secure. The company policy should include data collection rules and assigning different roles to credible employees to maintain data quality.
System Evaluation and Updates
The performance of the whole business intelligence data warehouse system should be evaluated regularly. The system should also be updated whenever required. For example, a production company records daily production, material, and process efficiencies. However, the system does not use sales data to predict profitability and market trends. The company should also work to integrate that data with the system to get valuable information from the system.
Conclusion
Data warehousing and business intelligence are essential tools for modern business growth. The ability of the system to collect, organize, and analyze data helps businesses to make the right decisions for business growth.
The data warehouse stores diversified and reliable large amounts of data, while the business intelligence tools help in data interpretation and visualization.
Organizations using data warehousing and business intelligence tools can use data more effectively, making more powerful decisions and increasing profitability by implementing more sustainable policies.
