Drill Down to Ask Why, Part 1

In 2002, Bill Schmarzo, a former member of the Kimball Group, proposed a very useful architecture for decision-making, which he called the analytic application process. According to Bill, an analytic application consists of five stages:

  1. Publish reports. Provide standard operational and managerial “report cards” on the current state of a business.
  2. Identify exceptions. Reveal the exceptional performance situations to focus attention
  3. Determine causal factors. Seek to understand the “why” or root causes behind the identified exceptions.
  4. Model alternatives. Provide a backdrop to evaluate different decision alternatives.
  5. Track actions. Evaluate the effectiveness of the recommended actions and feed the decisions back to both the operational systems and DW, against which stage one reporting will be conducted, thereby closing the loop.