Most organizations have the Information Technology (IT) department run their
data warehousing projects. While IT departments know technology, they often think
differently from others in the business. What would appear to be a rather logical
C h a p t e r 3 : D a t a W a r e h o u s i n g a n d B u s i n e s s I n t e l l i g e n c e 59
cube design to an IT person may appear wildly confusing to end users in human
resources, finance, manufacturing, and so on. Therefore, it is critical to understand
the end users, their technical skills, and most importantly, the data that they want and
how they want to work with it.
The analytics portion of PerformancePoint Server, covered in version 1.0 mainly
by ProClarity, is extremely powerful and perfect for analysts. However, without a set
of precanned reports, many end users are bewildered by the prospect of navigating a
cube, and they often don??™t have time to perform their own detailed analysis anyway.
Therefore, before starting a BI project, it is critical to identify the users, their
need for the data, and the tools that can used to achieve these goals. Chapter 1
discussed the different types of users and tools that fit most of those situations, so it
is important to remember those points moving forward. In addition to those points,
consider creating hierarchies which guide users down a path that reflects the way
they break up the world, their customers, their products, and so forth. If a group is
used to looking at products by category, subcategory, brand, and SKU, then by all
means create a hierarchy that contains that exact structure and create simple reports
that allow them to drill down that hierarchy simply by clicking.
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