Ever wonder why it is so hard to get the business users to go self serve? They don’t know the data. The simple questions of who what where when and how are difficult to answer.
So one of the early steps in any business intelligence initiative is to get to know our data. I remember last year talking with a client about some of their customer insight projects where they would get different answers to the same question from multiple people. Some of this is that business questions can be ambiguous, but largely it comes from knowing thy data.
We know about Metadata, but rarely is this done properly. So how is the business going to know where to find that element of the data in the enterprise, maybe they don’t even know where it is. The entrance of Enterprise Information Integration (EII – like ipedo) help take federated data and make it look centralized, but as we know the same data element can exist in the business process foodchain, but where do we get it from? Metadata, metadata, metadata.
Data in the enterprise is a challenge as there is so much of it. So get to know it. There are insights in there that you just need to find. It is there – know thy data.
Or maybe I should say "If you know it, it will come" with the first it being data and the second being business value.
