Then, the data
must be located in the various source systems and consolidated in such a way that it
C h a p t e r 1 : T h e C a s e f o r B u s i n e s s I n t e l l i g e n c e 5
is consistent and accessible. This is the process of building a data warehouse or data
mart, and is covered in detail in Chapter 3. This is often a challenging process, with
many companies seeming to make the mistake of believing that this is the beginning
and end of their BI project. I have personally been into numerous companies that
have built warehouses and then provided completely inadequate tools for letting
people actually use the information contained in the warehouse. This is like buying a
car and then locking it in a garage so it can never be driven; the potential value will
never be realized.
After building the warehouse, there must be a mechanism to retrieve the data and
present it to business users so that they can understand it and act upon what they see.
This is where PerformancePoint Server and ProClarity come in, because they are tools
built to provide businesses with the ability to monitor and analyze the data. Much of
the ability to easily grasp data is because of visualization capabilities available in the
products, such as charts, graphs, scorecards, decomposition trees, performance maps,
and so on. The data in warehouses can also be used in traditional reports, which, when
viewed online, may include interactivity for performing data analysis.
PerformancePoint Server adds another piece to the mix: modeling.
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