By Jason English
Enter the war room.The whole C-level team is on deck as your latest quarterly figures appear to tell a different story than expected. The BizOps report shows that specific regions are achieving greater than expected top-line growth, but global news of an economic slowdown suggests the opposite is true.
After reviewing the information carefully, senior executives suspect that the reports are wrong. However, unravelling where the potential issues lies is a daunting task:
- Is the report rendering incorrectly?
- Is there a problem in the report logic—or the business logic around it?
- Is there a problem in the data feed into the BI system?
- Is the data being drawn from the appropriate data warehouse instance(s)?
- Is there an issue in the load, transformation, extraction, or source of the various data feeds driving data into the data warehouse?
The potential for complexity is immense. Just 10 years ago, most large enterprises had only a handful of core data services (3 on average). Even if that picture was a bit rosy, with the advance of cloud, process outsourcing to SaaS and partners, mobile work, and connected IoT devices, the total number of possible enterprise data sources has ballooned into the millions, feeding into specialized data aggregators and warehouses that could run just about anywhere in a hybrid IT infrastructure.
