How We Interact With Data: The PRIME Model

Based on my experience and observations, I classify the way in which humans interact with data into five categories of activity:

Produce
This activity consists mainly of creating, updating, and transforming data and is the primary focus of the Capture and Process phases of the BI life-cycle.

Review
The focus of this activity is the passive consumption of static data.

Investigate
This activity involves a person drilling into or analyzing data in an effort to answer questions about one or more business processes represented by the data. Some of this activity may be automated through the use of data mining tools.

Monitor
I define monitoring as the exact opposite of reviewing; that is, active consumption of dynamic data. More on this later.

Extrapolate
Unlike other activities that focus on past results or present conditions, extrapolation attempts to predict future outcomes based on present conditions. The goal of this activity is to capitalize on potential future opportunities while avoiding or minimizing potential future threats.

Those of you who have poked into business intelligence before have probably run across a conceptual model that is different from this, in that it represents BI as a pyramid, like the following graph:


I like the PRIME approach over the pyramid approach for the following reasons:
1. There’s an implication that the higher you are on the pyramid the more sophisticated you are as a business intelligence operation. PRIME doesn’t care about that, but rather sticks to the activities involved so you can focus on the right tool for the activity.
2. Various manifestations of the pyramid approach tend to focus on applications like reporting, analysis, etc. As we’ll see, PRIME maps into these applications pretty well, but PRIME focuses on the activity rather than the application used for the activity.

Next, we’ll dig deeper into the activity categories of the PRIME model.

Next Topic: Produce