Enterprise Data Warehousing

A Data Warehouse is considered the foundation of Business Intelligence. The two concepts linked together provide a complete end-to-end system. Independently, queryable data can be referred to as Enterprise Data Warehouse and Value-Add Analytics as BI applications. The focus of data warehousing is on information provisioning which essentially creates business insight possibilities that culminate into knowledge.

"A data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant and non-volatile collection of data in support of management's decision making process." - Bill Inmon

In principle it is a database accessible across the enterprise that contains historic and current data about all of the crucial entities found in the business. The data is static and cannot be altered once it is added to the database and it may come from many sources inside and outside the enterprise. It is a system of records and when implementing an enterprise warehouse the emphasis is on realising the vision of creating a single, unified version of the truth for the enterprise. We have identified the three major advantages of Data Warehouses: integrating data from multiple sources, performing new types of analyses; and reducing cost to access historical data.

Kwezi Software Solutions data warehousing approach is based on industry best practices evolving from a combination of standards and principles mainly from Ralph Kimball and Bill Inmon. The approach is not specific to a particular product, technology and is platform agnostic. The primary objectives are to design a data warehouse that is optimized for performance, to economize on resources and to cater for most types of applications e.g. BI, MIS, EIS, standard reporting, analytics, MDM, and data mining.

We believe the primary motivation for investing in Data Warehouses is to provide more timely information for decision-making. Kwezi Software Solutions can support, and manage all implementation phases. We provide focused and specialised assistance in specific phases of the implementation.

Our Service Offering

Evaluation

Review existing implementations of data warehouses and BI systems and recommend enhancements (where applicable) that is aligned with industry standards and best practices. This includes assessments of the system architecture, implementation methodology, data and process designs, technical system configurations, performance factors and query/report design and configurations.

Readiness Assessment

Review an organization's BI and/or data warehousing maturity and recommend the most appropriate implementation strategy (road-map).

Business Analytics

Determine the business requirements for the solution, as well as the available data sources that can be used to satisfy these requirements. These requirements are then translated into technical system requirements.

System Design

Develop or refine the BI or Data Warehouse architecture (which includes the data and process designs). System Design must ensure that best practices are entrenched e.g. integration, data quality and MDM principles, use of dimensional models.

Implementation

Develop, test and deploy all system components and objects as defined in the design specifications. It includes physical database and ETL process implementations.

Project Management

Manage the implementation phases and resourcing of a BI or data warehouse solution, either using Kwezi Software Solutions or the client's SDLC methodology. Fundamental to project success is the active involvement of the business community.

Maintenance

Ongoing maintenance of the BI and/or data warehouse system which entails execution and monitoring of all ETL and front-end processes, database management, scheduling, report and presentation management, error handling, resolution, change management and data management.