Month: April 2017
ENTERPRISE DATA MANAGEMENT
To start, it is practical for the business owner to be educated in new developments surrounding Enterprise Data Management (EDM). I spent the past month researching EDM in part with the online education environment. Enterprise Data Management is the soul of modern business development in the digital age.
In effort to share what I discovered, let’s begin with my adventure into world of Big Data. Enterprise refers to the business process as one activity, for instance Live Nation Entertainment has a business process which includes activities from Ticketmaster, Live Nation Concerts, Front Line Management Group, and Live Nation Network. The source data from all the business activities must be collected, extracted, transformed, and loaded before the data can be usable for running reports or analysis. Although the business process varies for company to company, Enterprise Data Management is a necessary solution in today’s business environment.
During my intensive research, I discovered that the Data Management process must control and manage data with the assistance of technology support systems. Generally speaking, The ETL development starts out with the high-level plan, which is independent of any specific technology approach, (Kimball Group). The Data Warehouse Toolkit by Ralph Kimball, and Margy Ross is recommended for further reading. I discovered that there are many types of projects where having a well- defined approach to managing data is the key to success. For instance deciding what to put in the fact table. The ETL process for fact table incremental processing differs from the load, and doesn’t need to be fully automated. However, the facts must be entered after the business process has been decided.
Never the less, the ETL architecture must have the capability to implement slowly changing dimension (SCD) logic, (Kimball). The Kimball technical system architecture separates the data and processes comprising the DW/BI system into the backroom (extract), transformation and load (ETL) environment and the front room presentation area, with metadata processed throughout the operation. The metadata is all the information that defines and describes the structure, operation, and contents of the DW/BI system (Kimball).
As previously mentioned, Enterprise Data Management is a major concern for all business enterprises. Building a comprehensive strategy to maintain the DW/BI Lifecycle was conceived by the Kimball Group in the mid-1980s. “Regardless of your organization’s specific DW/BI objectives, we believe an overarching team goal should be business acceptance of the DW/BI deliverables to support the business’ decision making” (Kimball). Today’s Big Data is arriving from a multitude of sources. The company must invest resources and time in order to take advantage of the business opportunities which are waiting to be discovered with BI tools for analysis.
ED MacAudio 