In most organization, transactional systems which acquires massive amount of data requires data profiling and data quality tools to achieve consistent and accurate reporting. Data quality tools are typically geared towards a bottom up assessment of the integrity of transactional data.
However with BI, there is a clear need to be able to perform drill down from the highest level of reporting. Executives commonly review high level reports or management packs provided by the finance department. Some of these include Revenue by Region, Margin by Product, Profit & Loss by Channel reports etc. These reports are often segmented by the various corporate dimensions such as country, legal entity, channel, management company, product, business unit, department etc. As a result, dimension management is a top down proactive data quality effort.
Therefore, while data quality assessments are extremely valid and useful, they are of little use in hierarchy management. Business Intelligence typically benefit greatly from a good hierarchy management implementation, because centralized reporting dimension maintenance and validation often means that management reporting systems will receive updated records prior to the new values being activated on source systems. This proactive hierarchy management means that BI developers can spend their time developing and tuning processes rather than tracking missing keys for new accounts and cost centers.
As a result, hierarchy management should not only live in the finance or SOX domain, BI professionals should take an active role in managing this to ensure there’s a clear top-down drill path for any type of reporting, planning and analysis.
- History of Hyperion MDM
- The Missing Link in BI
- Oracle’s Hyperion Data Relationship Management
- Why Master Data Management?
- Building Hierarchies with Automator
- History of Hyperion
- Random Q&A
- Tracking Changes – Part II
- The BI Mumbo Jumbo
- Join me at Collaborate 10!
