Wednesday, December 29, 2010

PRIME Model: Produce Category

Before consuming data in the business intelligence life-cycle, humans interact with data by producing it. This happens when they enter data into a transaction system, and it also happens in the Process stage of the life-cycle in cases where data from the transaction system are transformed to create new data prior to loading into the data warehouse or other BI data space. For more information about these processes, you can review the previous sections on “Capturing and Processing Data.”

But we also produce data as a result of other interactions we have with the data. Take the example of a knowledge worker who, in the process of analyzing accounting data, has an insight about what is going on with the business based on those data. In documenting that insight, the knowledge worker effectively creates or produces new data that did not previously exist. (Note that I could have used the word “create” for this activity, but the “CRIME” model just didn’t have the same ring to it.) In a similar fashion, an analyst working with data mining tools can use those tools to give previously unknown meaning to a hidden relationship he or she finds in data.

Even though the Produce category is not as pertinent as others in a discussion of consuming data, it is still an important component of the model and so I chose to include it with the rest of the model here rather than introducing the entire PRIME model in the earlier material on capturing and processing data.

Next Topic: Review

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