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:
- Publish reports. Provide standard operational and managerial “report cards” on the current state of a business.
- Identify exceptions. Reveal the exceptional performance situations to focus attention
- Determine causal factors. Seek to understand the “why” or root causes behind the identified exceptions.
- Model alternatives. Provide a backdrop to evaluate different decision alternatives.
- 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.
TCO Starts With the End User: Decision Making
Bad Decisions Are Costs
the data warehouse publishes the data assets of the company to most effectively facilitate decision-making. In other words, the data warehouse is an organizationwide resource, the cost and value of which you must judge by its effect on decision-making in the broadest possible sense
.. “IT is an enabler of value, not a provider of value.”
.. A good partnership means that IT staff live in the end-user environments, and that there’s a flow of personnel across the end-user/IT organization boundary. I’ve often said that the best application support person is permanently conflicted as to whether the business or the technology is more appealing. These people (of which I am one) spend their entire careers moving back and forth across the end-user/IT boundary.