Client: “How do I target,
acquire, retain and make
them loyal?” Finance: “How do I get a
dashboard of my financial
positions and exposures
when I want it?”
Business Process: “How do I
monitor, improve and excel
at core business processes?” Learning & Growth: “How
do we sustain our ability to
change and grow?
Figure 2: How can we get around the inherently
limiting idea of pre-commitment?
cases, even within a well-designed data warehouse. Yet modern enterprises
need to support a wide variety of evolving analytics patterns and workloads.
Pre-committing to a relational structure and treating it as a panacea almost
always leads to unhappy end-users.
A data design and storage approach that allows us to store data in raw form
without committing to a structure enables different tools to impose a struc-
ture, or schema, when the data is read. This “schema on read” approach is not
tied up front to a specific model. Every tool that uses all or part of the data can
use its own schema to add the specific meaning to the data required by the
specific analysis pattern.
Many Tools for Many Workloads Rather than
Standardization
I will use another Gerry Fierling quote that points to the ultimate limitations of
all business intelligence tools when it comes to supporting self-service BI.
”The last mile of business intelligence
is always Microsoft Excel.”
You may have invested in a multi-million dollar data warehouse appliance;
enterprise licenses for Tableau, MicroStrategy and Business Objects; a corpo-
rate performance management software suite for planning, budgeting and
forecasting; and a large onsite and/or offshore team that is furiously pumping
data from your SAP or Oracle applications into your data warehouse. But if you
roamed the office corridors in disguise, peeking at the computers of your most
prolific busines s analysts, you would find them all hitting the “export to Excel”
button in a hurry. Excel, notwithstanding all its inadequacies, still frees users
from the shackles and idiosyncrasies of the fancy tools that you’ve invested in.
SPRING 2017 | THE DOPPLER | 23