Consultancy
Business Intelligence can be quite a daunting subject if you have never
approached it before. There are many options available, however choosing
the most cost effective method.
Services that I can help with arrange from
Creating a Data Warehouse deployment plan - This involves getting a list of requirements
from the users, documenting them into Business
Requirements Documentation.
Data Analysis and Action Plan - What data does your company
have? What data is important? What format is the data in? All
these are things that I can either offer as a service to document or to
facilitate a plan to integrate these disperse data sources int a single source.
The image above shows all the global areas that need to be considered to
ensure that the BI project is a success.
Design
Designing the Data Warehouse is more important than then end platform. All
Facts and Dimensions should be correctly designed, usually in a Star schema,
whereby a fact lies in the centre and all dimensional (attribute) data around the outside.
This design reflects very much on what the initial requirements of the data
warehouse is to capture. The fact will always represent the lowest
required granularity for efficiency.
Services that can be offered in the design
Dimension Modelling and Fact Modelling - Designing the basic
models that will be ready to implement into any SQL Server database.
ETL - Scripting the loading of the database from source systems
to a data warehouse database.
Database Implementation - Creation and testing of the tables,
including indexing and any maintenance plans.
Development
Finally, the development of the Business Intelligence Environment in a Microsoft
Environment this would be using the following tools:
SSIS - SQL Server Integration Services -Creating a
Integration Services Plan to handle the extraction and loading of data from the
source data and processing the Data Warehouse.
SSAS - SQL Server Analysis Services - Creating a
representation of the design within SSAS, ensuring that the design works and all
partitions are setup correctly
SSRS - SQL Server Reporting Services - Creating
Reports and charts from the data warehouse
Training
At each stage training and knowledge transfer can be offered.
These services complement these areas: