« Operational BI - Can the OLTPs scale up? | Main | Business Intelligence and Six Sigma »
February 9, 2008
Zen and the Art of Data Management - The Starting Point!
BI practitioners and business users agree that for good decision making - "Data is everything". After all, the input to any strategic information is raw data and there is enough realization that "Good data is a source of competitive advantage and not just any data".
Having said that, even now, many organizations don't have a comprehensive focus on data that is present within its boundaries. I attribute the problem to the fact that data management strategists haven't been able to get their arms around organizational data in the MECE sense. In consultant speak, MECE turns out to be an acronym for "Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive".
I have found it useful to categorize data into the following 6 MECE types:
Type 1:
Transaction Structure Data -Business processes are a series of never-ending transactions. All these transactions has a context and this is defined by this category of data. Examples are: Products, Customers, Departments, Geographies etc.
Type 2:
Transaction Activity Data - These are the transactions themselves. Ex: Purchase Order data, Sales Invoices etc.
Type 3:
Enterprise Structure Data - These data elements are unique to each organization and the inter-relationships between data elements are important. Ex: Chart of Accounts, Org Structure, Bill of materials, etc.
Type 4:
Reference Data - Set of codes, typically name-value pairs that drives business rules. Ex: Region Codes, Customer Types etc.
Type 5:
Metadata - Data that defines other data thus making the collection a self-defining entity
Type 6:
Audit Data - With so much focus on regulatory compliance, this is that data that tracks history of all amendments to business data within the enterprise.
Type 1,3 & 4 together is defined as Master Data and its management is the subject of numerous BI articles and white papers.
The topic of Data Management would be discussed more in detail in the subsequent posts.
Thanks and Keep Reading!
Posted by Karthikeyan Sankaran at February 9, 2008 3:00 AM
