Seven aspects of a successful business intelligence (BI) architecture

Seven aspects of a successful business intelligence (BI) architecture

What is required for a successful business intelligence (BI) architecture?

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

    When you register, you'll receive targeted emails designed to keep you informed of the latest BI, analytics, corporate performance management (CPM) trends and more.

    Hannah Smalltree, Editorial Director

    By submitting your registration information to SearchBusinessAnalytics.com you agree to receive email communications from TechTarget and TechTarget partners. We encourage you to read our Privacy Policy which contains important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Your use of SearchBusinessAnalytics.com is governed by our Terms of Use. You may contact us at webmaster@TechTarget.com.

A successful BI architecture needs to:

  • Support the various analytical and reporting styles of the business executives and other workers who are using the BI system. That may include reporting, ad hoc querying, online analytical processing (OLAP), data mining, predictive analytics, data visualization and, of course, spreadsheet integration.
  • Provide access to the level of comprehensive, consistent, clean and current data that the business needs for analysis – and is willing to pay for.
  • Systematically implement and support data governance processes.
  • Separate data integration from BI reporting and analysis processes.
  • Implement the staging of data from systems of record through a data warehouse to data marts or cubes – i.e., a hub-and-spoke approach.
  • Create a business-oriented “semantic layer” to give users a view of the information available for reporting and analytics.
  • Create a “live” data and reporting dictionary that business users can use while accessing reports or as a table of contents (with definitions) for the data available to them.

You will be able to design a high-level BI architecture early in your project, but it later will need to be designed in greater detail and built out incrementally and iteratively if you are going to provide a robust BI environment.

Note: Don’t believe vendor “marketectures” that promise you an integrated and robust BI architecture simply by installing their software. Set realistic expectations, both for the business and IT. Implementing a successful BI architecture is a journey, not a one-time event.

This was first published in September 2010

Join the conversationComment

Share
Comments

    Results

    Contribute to the conversation

    All fields are required. Comments will appear at the bottom of the article.
    Back to top