“The Honeypot” - Hivetec’s Data Warehouse Insights Lab

C) BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE FROM MULTIPLE SOURCES
For many organisations, enterprise information systems are comprised of multiple subsystems,
physically separated and built on different platforms. Moreover, merging data from multiple
disparate data sources is a common need when conducting business intelligence. To solve
this problem, the data warehouse integrates existing disparate data sources and makes them
accessible in one place. Consolidating enterprise data into a single data repository alleviates the
burden of duplicating data gathering efforts, and enables the extraction of information that would
otherwise be impossible. Additionally, the data warehouse becomes the “single view of truth”
for the enterprise rather than the multiple truths that can come from reporting on individual
subsystems.
(Specific jobactive/DES Benefits (Would you like to?):
(i) Broaden the sources of data analysed. For example, the Bridge database has CRM data including
forms submissions and ESS-Bridge interaction. What is lacking is data from your HR team. Imagine if you
could merge your HR data with Bridge data to find a best balance between commission rates and fixed
salary rates for your business development teams. Based on a metric such as brokered vacancies, this
will provide you with more flexibility to increase fixed salary when they are out-performing increase the
commission rate when they are under performing.
(ii) Evaluate your marketing strategy by checking geographical data from your website traffic against
number of placements per site. To do this analysis you need to merge your website traffic information
(e.g. google analytics) with the Bridge database. The data warehouse can more easily help you achieve
this.
D) TIMELY ACCESS TO DATA
The data warehouse enables business users and decision makers to have access to data from
many different sources. Additionally, business users will spend little time in the data retrieval
process. Scheduled data integration routines, known as ETL (Extract-Transform-Load), are
leveraged within a data warehouse environment. These routines consolidate data from multiple
source systems and transform the data into a useful format. Subsequently, business users can
then easily access data from one interface. Further, consumers of data will be able to query
data directly with less information technology support. The wait time for information
technology professionals to develop reports and queries is greatly diminished as the business
users are given the ability to generate reports and queries on their own. The use of query and
analysis tools against a consistent and consolidated data repository enables business users to
spend more time performing data analysis and less time gathering data.
Specific jobactive/DES Benefits (Would you like to?):
(i) Configure the data warehouse to create your daily reports at certain times. As this process
is automated, your BI team can spend their time on creating other reports while they monitor ETL
processes. For example, a typical no future appointment reports takes 45 minutes in average to create
using Microsoft Excel and Access but by using a data warehouse you can reduce this process to less than
2 minutes.
(ii) In a data warehouse you load and refresh only attributes that your reports need. That is, the
running time of extracting data sources in the data warehouse is significantly lower than loading and
refreshing whole tables. For example, if your report includes the number of clients in each age category
you no longer need to load all client details – simply a client’s JSID and Date of Birth.