It exist a lot of concepts and terms that it is necessary to know and handle when a team working with Business Intelligence issues. In order to really understand all these concepts and its relationships, it is necessary grouping these terms by functions inside the whole Business Intelligence Design and Implementation.
Initial Concepts and Definitions...
Instead of established concepts, every organization establishes its own interpretations for every term, so this article contains the most utilized interpretation for every term or concept.
From the functional point of view, we have these groups of components:
- Transactional or Operational Systems – Source Data Systems: The main source for business intelligence data to be analyzed is all data captured, processed and reported by all core transactional systems for the company or organization.
- Data Transfers Processes – Data Interfaces – ETL Processes: All necessary data must be processed from source data systems to a specialized repositories or to show to final users. These data interfaces are called ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) processes.
- Data Repositories: Depending on the size and the reach of this repository, it could be named datawarehouse: when the stored data is about all organization or the most of this organization; or could be named datamart when the stored data is about isolated departments or organizational units.
- Final Users Tools: For obtaining, querying, analyzing and reporting valuable information, final users have special tools that access datawarehouses and datamarts (even transactional data), and these tools access the data dictionaries for document and inform to users what is the accessed data and which is its meaning.
- Information Distribution and Control: Regular reports, news and other information must be delivered in a timely and secure fashion to any selected way like email, mobile, web and others to appropriate personnel.