PAKISTAN BUSINESS REVIEW - Institute of Business Management

Market Report
Business Intelligence: A New Dimension to Business
We must begin by defining and designing data
management strategy to ensure that the organization has the
right information and uses it properly. The challenge is to collect
clean data, from various sources so that BI solutions deliver the
correct actionable information to management at different levels.
The organization should concentrate on quality of data, and
investment must be made to ensure high levels of data quality.
The duplicate data should be unified as it comes from various
sources. The data coming from the transaction system is atomic
level data and should be recorded in detailed form.
The integration of data is important as it is generated
by various operational systems with different naming
conventions, attributes, codes, business rules and measurement.
Inconsistencies have to be removed by standardized various
data elements. The data should be distributable among various
users at various levels located at different locations.
Most companies don’t have a precise view about their
customers, products, suppliers, inventory or even employees.
Whenever organizations add new enterprise applications to
“manage” data, they unwittingly contribute to an overall
confusion about an organization’s overall view of the enterprise.
As a result, the concept of master data management (MDM),
creating a single, unified view of an organization is growing in
importance now a days.
Data transformation is one of the most important stages,
where the data coming from various sources gets into the data
warehouse after going through the various stages of data
cleansing. It is necessary to first clean and validate data using
business rules through data cleansing tools. Transformation
procedure defines business logics which maps data from its
source to destination. ETL (Extract, Transfer and Load) tools are
very mature and helpful for reducing the development time,
managing the flow of data from source to destination and
uploading data to the tables of data warehouse. ETL tools can
assist in ensuring that data is cleansed and conforms to
standards before entering into the data warehouse. The ETL
processes consist of the following steps:
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PAKISTAN BUSINESS REVIEW JULY 2011