Data Sources

Proper analysis and integration of foreign data sources into a Business Intelligence system can be a time consuming and complicated process. For each new data source I always recommend that a brief business case, made up of the following 11 questions, be put together. This helps prioritise the ETLing and identify problem areas for each source prior to beginning the process.

To often I have seen organisations build a data warehouse and populate it with data from 2-3 corporate databases. Is this valuable, probably, but could we improve the value by combining it with data from outside the organisation, definitely. Consider what a data warehouse actually is – I would describe it as “an accessible repository of valuable data from disparate sources”. The keyword here is disparate. So before reading on, have a think about where you would usefully extract data from.