accessing organizational information – data warehouse

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Chapter 8Chapter 8

Accessing Organizational Accessing Organizational Information – Data Information – Data

WarehouseWarehouse

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Learning Outcomes

8.1 Describe the roles and purposes of data warehouses and data marts in an organization

8.2 Compare the multidimensional nature of data warehouses (and data marts) with the two-dimensional nature of databases

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Learning Outcomes

8.3 Identify the importance of ensuring the cleanliness of information throughout an organization

8.4 Explain the relationship between business intelligence and a data warehouse

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History of Data Warehousing

• Data warehouses extend the transformation of data into information

• In the 1990’s executives became less concerned with the day-to-day business operations and more concerned with overall business functions

• The data warehouse provided the ability to support decision making without disrupting the day-to-day operations

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Data Warehouse Fundamentals

• Data warehouse – a logical collection of information – gathered from many different operational databases – that supports business analysis activities and decision-making tasks

• The primary purpose of a data warehouse is to aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repository for decision-making purposes

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• Extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) – a process that extracts information from internal and external databases, transforms the information using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads the information into a data warehouse

• Data mart – contains a subset of data warehouse information

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Multidimensional Analysis and Data Mining

• Databases contain information in a series of two-dimensional tables

• In a data warehouse and data mart, information is multidimensional, it contains layers of columns and rows– Dimension – a particular attribute of

information

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• Cube – common term for the representation of multidimensional information

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• Data mining – the process of analyzing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone

• To perform data mining users need data-mining tools– Data-mining tool – uses a variety of techniques to

find patterns and relationships in large volumes of information and infers rules that predict future behavior and guide decision making

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Information Cleansing or Scrubbing

• An organization must maintain high-quality data in the data warehouse

• Information cleansing or scrubbing – a process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete information

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• Contact information in an operational system

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• Standardizing Customer name from Operational Systems

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• Information cleansing activities

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• Accurate and complete information

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Business Intelligence

• Business intelligence – information that people use to support their decision-making efforts

• Principle BI enablers include:– Technology– People– Culture

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OPENING CASE STUDY QUESTIONSIt Takes A Village to Write an Encyclopedia

1. Determine how Wikipedia could use a data warehouse to improve its business operations

2. Explain why Wikipedia must cleanse or scrub the information in its data warehouse

3. Explain how a company could use information from Wikipedia to gain business intelligence

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CHAPTER EIGHT CASEMining the Data Warehouse

• According to a Merrill Lynch survey in 2006, business intelligence software and data-mining tools were at the top of the technology spending list of CIOs

• Ben & Jerry’s, California Pizza Kitchen, and Noodles & Company are using business intelligence and data mining in new and exciting ways

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Chapter Eight Case Questions

1. Explain how Ben & Jerry’s is using business intelligence tools to remain successful and competitive in a saturated market

2. Identify why information cleansing and scrubbing is critical to California Pizza Kitchen’s business intelligence tool’s success

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Chapter Eight Case Questions

3. Illustrate why 100 percent accurate and complete information is impossible for Noodles & Company to obtain

4. Describe how each of the companies above is using BI from their data warehouse to gain a competitive advantage

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UNIT CLOSING CASE ONE Harrah’s – Gambling Big on Technology

1. Identify the effects poor information might have on Harrah’s service-oriented business strategy

2. Summarize how Harrah’s uses database technologies to implement its service-oriented strategy

3. Harrah’s was one of the first casino companies to find value in offering rewards to customers who visit multiple Harrah’s locations. Describe the effects on the company if it did not build any integrations among the databases located at each of its casinos

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4. Estimate the potential impact to Harrah’s business if there is a security breach in its customer information

5. Explain the business effects if Harrah’s fails to use data-mining tools to gather business intelligence

6. Identify three different types of data marts Harrah’s might want to build to help it analyze its operational performance

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7. Predict what might occur if Harrah’s fails to clean or scrub its information before loading it into its data warehouse

8. How could Harrah’s use data mining to increase revenue?

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UNIT CLOSING CASE TWO Searching for Revenue - Google1. Determine if Google’s search results are

examples of transactional information or analytical information

2. Describe the ramifications on Google’s business if the search information it presented to its customers was of low quality

3. Explain how the Web site RateMyProfessors.com solved its problem of poor information

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UNIT CLOSING CASE TWO Searching for Revenue - Google

4. Identify the different types of entity classes that might be stored in Google’s indexing database

5. Identify how Google could use a data warehouse to improve its business

6. Explain why Google would need to scrub and cleanse the information in its data warehouse

7. Identify a data mart that Google’s marketing and sales department might use to track and analyze its AdWords revenue

accessing organizational information – data warehouse

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