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SFSU Business Intelligence > Technical Overview

Business Intelligence Technical Overview

SF State has decided to build a Business Intelligence solution using industry proven technology to enable strategic business decision support in ways that are not possible today.

A functional introductory overview of business intelligence has been circulated previously. The focus of this paper is on the technical side with the goal of showing how the individual pieces of a BI system fit together.

Introduction

Generally, there are three major BI components:

  • ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load)
  • A dimensionally modeled data warehouse
  • An information analysis and reporting tool for the end users
ETL retrieves a copy of the data from the original source systems, transforms it according to the business rules and requirements, and loads it into the data warehouse. ETL accomplishes most of the work to make a data warehouse possible.

A dimensionally modeled data warehouse or local data store is a read only information repository used by the business and IT personnel for analysis and reporting. The dimensions in the reporting database/data warehouse are closely aligned to the business categories reflecting how people think of their business and making analysis and reporting intuitive.

An information analysis and reporting tool is a user friendly, powerful, and flexible means of slicing and dicing the information in order to produce simple or complex reports and to perform simple or complex information analysis.

At SF State, accomplishing all of the above would be insurmountable without a BI solution due to resource constraints. In fact, even at establishments with large IT departments hand coding ETL alone is a major undertaking. Therefore, an industry proven technology is the only viable option for building a business intelligence solution.

To make any kind of BI solution successful, the stakeholders and the development team must follow a proven methodology. Representatives from the different departments must work together on defining the functional and technical requirements. There must also be a steering committee in place comprised of subject matter experts, business and IT personnel in order to address and resolve any issues and to guide the process of information gathering and transformation.


For more detailed description on each of the major BI components Click On each of the below links:

ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load)

A dimensionally modeled data warehouse

An information analysis and reporting tool


Summary

Business Intelligence technology will provide users at SF State with a flexible and powerful reporting and information analysis.

This kind of functionality cannot be developed with the limited time and resources. Therefore, an industry proven BI solution is the only feasible choice. Combining the efforts of the department stakeholders and the development team, business intelligence can be successfully implemented at SF State delivering robust reporting and analysis as well as providing the individual departments with better control over their respective data.

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