Prepare for the Information Deluge

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

Through the current history of the data warehousing world, the size of data has been measured primarily through gigabytes and most recently through terabytes on occasion. The grain of a data warehouse (i.e. the level of transaction detail) within the data warehouse has been maintained at the business process level.

For example, our data warehouses today contain bank transactions, vehicle repairs, product orders and customer purchases. These are all discreet business process events that you and I recognize in our daily lives. However, things are beginning to change in the way that processes are measured.

In the past, events were measured at the macro-level; now, events are being measured at the micro-level. Consider the following example: In the past, when your vehicle had a problem and it went into the repair shop, a technician would diagnose the problem at a macro-level by physically examining the engine and would then perform the repair. Today, that same technician plugs in a device into the on-board diagnostics port in the vehicle to capture information about the vehicle's "current state" and then makes an assessment on what the problem is.

In both cases, information is captured about the repair. In the first situation, basic attributes are captured: the VIN of the vehicle, the type of vehicle, the physical symptoms of the repair, the …

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