BI Data Life-Cycle: Capture

Previously, I described a life-cycle of business intelligence data with four main stages: Capture, Process, Consume, and Archive. This article deals with the Capture stage of the cycle.

In some respects, a business treats data a lot like a factory treats raw material. And in order to do anything with the raw material you first have to get it. Let’s define “capture” as the process of getting raw data. How do we capture the data? The answer to that depends on how automated your business is. Our Old West general store owner from earlier in the chapter captured data in his sales ledger. Today, we might capture the same data in a point-of-sale (POS) terminal or from the Web if we do e-commerce. Or if we don’t do a lot of transactions, we may still issue a written receipt to the customer and then re-enter the data into a computer if we want to put it in electronic format. And of course, that’s not the only data we capture. We also capture data from purchase orders, shipping receipts, vendor invoices, tax forms, and many other sources.

Even though we don’t pay too much attention to data capture in the business intelligence processes that follow, it is still critical to BI. The reason for this is simple: if you don’t capture it in the beginning, you can’t analyze it later. Have you been to a retail store lately and as you go to check out, the sales clerk asks for your postal code? There may be any number of reasons for this. Maybe there are other stores nearby and they want to see if any of their markets are being over-served or under-served. Or maybe they want to see what postal codes their sales are coming from so they can better target mailings. (Or maybe they’re just nosy busybodies, but that’s probably not it. Probably not.) The key takeaway is this: if you want to analyze or report or mine the data (more about data mining later), you must capture it first.

Next time we'll discuss processing the captured data to prepare it for consumption.