Business Intelligence: The Savvy Manager's Guide: Getting Onboard with Emerging IT
This quick reference guide overviews the best practices, tools, methods, and processes used to transform an organization's data into actionable knowledge.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Business Intelligence: The Savvy Manager's Guide: Getting Onboard with Emerging IT
Chapter 10: Information Integration
The last few chapters have talked about the rules that surround information, the discovery of the metadata through data profiling, and the issues of measuring and maintaining high levels of data quality. Now that you have been introduced to the collection of raw data and its need for both profiling and quality assessment, the next step is to understand how information can be integrated, manipulated, and distributed to information consumers.
There are different aspects to the concept of information integration, because different purposes inspire different kinds of solutions. In this chapter we focus on different aspects of the integration process and the need to link information from multiple data sets.
The Business Case
In Chapter 2 we explored the value of information and identified the fact that the value of information can increase when it can be merged with other information. The business intelligence (BI) process revolves around the ability to collect, aggregate, and, most importantly, leverage the integration of different data sets together; the ability to collect that data and place it in a data warehouse provides the means by which that leverage can be obtained.
The only way to get data into a data warehouse is through an information integration process. The only way to consolidate information for data consumption is through an information integration process. The business case is quite simple: If your organization has committed to building a BI program, you will need to deal with this issue.
ETL: Extract, Transform, Load
A basic premise of...
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