In recent articles we've been talking about data governance and data integration and why these are so important to your business. One of the key best practices for successful governance and integration is to keep business intelligence data separate from transaction data (such as the data in your accounting or point of sale systems).
Once you grow your business to the point where you need the concepts discussed here, you’ll probably want a technical guru to head up the implementation. Remember as we go that my idea is not to make you that guru, but to give you enough information to be an intelligent consumer of the products and services that make a sustainable BI program possible.
One very important principle behind that sustainable BI program is that we want a separate place for the data we’re going to consume, away from the sources from which we captured the data in the first place. Different people may give different names to this separate place. For our purposes right now let’s use the term “data warehouse.” This isn’t completely accurate, because the term “data warehouse” has a very specific meaning for BI professionals. So we’ll come back to this later.
But for now, as a simplification, we’ll say that we take data from where it was captured, do some processing with it, and load it into the data warehouse. There are good reasons for this. First, the systems designed to capture the data are not typically designed to get data out as easily as it gets in. Second, as we’ve hinted at previously there may be two or more sources of data that need to be combined in a way that is meaningful for your business.
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