Regarding the management, organization, and accessibility of data, business intelligence and data warehousing are inseparable components of digital transformation. Data warehousing, in its simplest form, describes the procedures used by businesses to gather and store their data before putting it all together in “warehouses.”
The term “business intelligence” describes the procedures utilized to analyze this data and deliver useful insights to company leaders. Effective data leveraging is a core component of modern corporate operations and a major source of competitive advantage in virtually every market. This article will define, connect, and differentiate data warehousing and business intelligence. We will give a BI architectural diagram to visually show the relationship between these concepts and the foundation on which they operate. But before we go into that, let’s define a few terms.
Business Intelligence Architecture
The term “business intelligence architecture” refers to the rules and regulations for organizing data that utilize computational methods and tools to create data warehouse business intelligence for real-time data visualization, reporting, and analysis.
The backbone of every good business intelligence system should be a well-designed data warehouse. Architecture of business intelligence rely on a data warehouse as their central hub for storing and analyzing data.
Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Explained
Data warehousing and business intelligence refer to collecting and organizing a company’s data from various internal and external sources into a centralized location for analysis and generating useful insights using web-based business intelligence tools.
Both are necessary for effective business intelligence (BI), and we’ll show you how well the data warehouse contributes to BI by walking you through a BI architectural diagram.
Why Is Data Warehousing Important for Business Intelligence?
Regarding business intelligence, the most important type of data storage is provided by data warehouses. When it comes to informing everything from day-to-day choices to shifts in focus across an entire organization, business intelligence relies on performing complicated queries and analyzing numerous data sets.
Business intelligence consists of three major components to accomplish this goal: data collection, storage, and analysis. Data wrangling is typically made easier by technologies known as extract, transform, and load (ETL), which will be discussed in further depth in the following paragraphs. Data analysis is typically performed with business intelligence tools such as Chartio.
Data warehouses, which act as the intermediary between OLAP and data storage and are essentially the “glue” that holds this process together, are at the center of everything. They combine, summarize, and transform the data, making it much simpler to analyze.
Although data warehouses are the most important component of data storage, they are not the only type of technology that goes into storing data. When it comes to storing their data, many businesses go through several storage levels before they finally realize they require a data warehouse.
How to Connect Your Data Warehouse to Your Business Intelligence Platform
Integrating your business intelligence platform with data warehouse involves the following process:
Data source
A data warehousing platform (or its sub-categories, “data marts,” which store data for specific business processes or departments) is only as good as the sources from which it pulls information. It is a usual first step to determine who the most important people are and what kind of reporting they conduct that has to be fed into the data warehouse in order to raise the value of business intelligence.
There won’t be much need for explanation. For instance, reports generated by the ERP on financial transactions or the CRM on advertising campaigns. Some will be harder to spot than others, and they may concern less obvious but important data, such as telephone or email records of customers.
Data Warehouse
Data warehouse extraction and loading occur when the required data has been determined. This “extract, transform, and load” (ETL) procedure is essential to consolidate information from various locations into a single database. ETL is crucial because, in addition to extracting the data required for the data warehouse, it also cleans the data to ensure consistency and quality across all databases, independent of the source or system from which the data was derived. ETL relies on the concept of a “staging area,” where the raw data is stored, as its foundation. The information is then processed and altered. To process data is to transform it from its original form into a format suitable for analysis by users.
Good data must be separated from bad (unusable) data, which is done by processing operations such as filtering, duplicate removal, validation, and consistency modifications (common in spreadsheets, for example). The final phase, known as “load,” involves moving the newly processed data from the staging area to the appropriate location within the data warehouse. It is common practice for data loading to be a completely automated, batch-based, continuous procedure.
Business Intelligence
After the information has been entered into the data warehouse and properly cleansed, BI tools may evaluate it. Information gleaned from data warehouses will be analyzed by business intelligence software, which will then translate the gleaned insights into the information that is both actionable and simple to understand for business leaders. Business intelligence, in a nutshell, links the data warehouse to the person using the data. By leveraging machine learning, automation, and the capacity to analyze in seconds what could take a human worker week, business intelligence (BI) solutions enable users to query data and generate charts, reports, and other useful data warehouse reporting tools.
End-User Access
The final step in a business intelligence solution’s cycle is to provide users with actionable insights gained from the reports the solution has generated for them based on the data provided. The first three phases of this procedure are backend procedures whose primary purpose is to store and prepare the data for later usage safely.
The last part is the front-end procedure, which is the method the information is used by the people who need to know about it. Microsoft’s PowerBI is only one example of a market-leading business intelligence solution that provides excellent visualization to let non-technical people immediately use the data to make decisions. One of the primary goals of data warehousing and business intelligence is to provide people with the information they require in a format that is easy to understand.
One of the most important things to think about when choosing a BI solution is how easily the solution will allow end users who may not have the same level of technical expertise as the rest of the team to access and use the data.
The Bottom Line
BI and data warehousing has become crucial to the success of today’s businesses. This is since organizations nowadays compete based on their data-leverage skills more than ever before. Companies should thus seriously consider the necessity to spend money on methods that would allow them to consolidate their data and provide them with the means to put it to use in their projects. Additionally, hiring data warehousing services can still aid in your digital transformation.
ALSO READ: 10 New Technology Courses that are Worth Applying For
