Wikipedia defines Business Intelligence (BI) as the technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about company operations.
Such technologies include Data Warehousing, ETL, OLAP and Reporting.
Business Intelligence - The Challenge
Although BI covers a very broad spectrum of tools, technologies & approaches, there is always a critical requirement for clear & consistent understanding of the data, wherever it is stored and at whatever stage of the process it happens to be.
Without a consistent and reliable source of such data information, BI projects are both more difficult to implement and the resolution of reporting anomalies becomes near impossible.
Although the many different tools used on BI projects do have their own means of obtaining & storing this metadata, there are considerable problems involved in sharing this consistently and accurately between the various toolsets and across the organisation.
Business Intelligence – the Data Modeling Challenge
The solution to this metadata challenge is the classic role for data modeling and metadata management i.e. capturing & communicating the technical & business descriptions of data at all stages from source via transformation to presentation.
Data modeling techniques and associated data modeling & metadata management tools therefore have a critically important role to play in supporting the various BI toolsets & processes with consistent data descriptions & standards in a form that is understandable by both the technical & business communities.
Enterprise Applications – adding to the BI Data Modeling Challenge
Enterprise Applications such as SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft etc only add to this data modeling challenge, due to the complexity & opaqueness of their data architectures.
Given that such packages are now the major sources of operational & analytical data within companies, it is critical that they can be integrated into any data modeling or metadata management strategy in support of BI projects.
Although many BI tools and the EA vendors themselves do offer some level of data architecture information, Saphir technology remains the only toolset solely dedicated to delivering such EA metadata intelligence and directly interfacing to the leading data modeling tools.
Saphir is therefore a vital tool for any organization that has BI projects needing to access data residing in one or more Enterprise Application, allowing them to understand and manage these complex data architectures as easily as any other data source.
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