Modeling can
encompass planning, budgeting, and forecasting. While these three items can certainly
be done without a warehouse in place, the warehouse provides two major benefits:
first, historical data is easily accessible and can be examined for trends and past results;
second, the budgets and forecast can be put back into the warehouse and actual results
can be tracked against the budget or forecast in the warehouse as time moves on.
There are numerous pieces to a business intelligence solution. The term business
intelligence, or BI, is used in this book to indicate the entire process. The entire
process of business intelligence can be broken into the following steps:
1. Identifying the business problem(s) to be addressed by the warehouse and the
data needed to address those problems.
2. Identifying the location for all necessary data and extracting it from those
sources.
3. Transforming the data from various sources into consolidated, consistent data.
4. Loading the transformed data into a centralized location.
5. Building a data warehouse (or data mart) with the data from the centralized
location. The structure being built is called a cube.
6. Putting in place commercial products or custom applications that give access to
the data in the cubes. There are many different ways of working with cube data,
and different approaches make sense for different roles within an organization.
6 B u s i n e s s I n t e l l i g e n c e w i t h M i c r o s o f t O f f i c e P e r f o r m a n c e P o i n t S e r v e r 2 0 0 7
Step 1 requires you to identify the business problems to be solved and is beyond
the scope of this book except for casual mention.
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