7. Unified BI

For a large corporation to have a reliable business intelligence (BI) initiative it needs to have a way of integrating information from various parts of the company. The company needs what is called a “single version of the truth.” Various information architectures have been designed to support the idea of a unified BI, however, none have proven to be a real solution to a growing problem. The question to be answered in this post is:

How can a company unify its various data warehouses, CRM databases, and other elements of a BI environment?

There is only one solution and, luckily, it is a simple one. The unifying principle of BI is to have universal object identifiers. The company unifies its BI environment by providing unique identities for each and every significant object in the BI environment. Allow the various business units within the company to evolve their own data mart with their own architectures as long as they provide the same unique, company-wide, identification for each object in their database.

By objects, I mean those identifiable entities that are relevant to the business, including the customers, business units, and products that are involved in the day-to-day transactions of business. Different departments of the company, each trying to satisfy its own business needs, may keep different data about these business objects, but the data can be integrated and shared among the departments as long as the customers, business units, and products have a common company-wide identity throughout the company.

The primary class of objects that is of interest to the company’s business, however, is the transaction itself. Each commercial transaction, representing the sale of item, the payment of an expense, or the trading of assets, is an object that must have a unique identity, produced as it occurs to the business. With each transaction being assigned a unique identifier at the time of its creation (i.e. a point of sale), the information in a marketing data warehouse can be integrated and analyzed with related information in the finance, sales, and customer relations departments.

Universal object identifiers are the key to a unified BI, providing the company with a version of the facts that transcends the boundaries of various departmental boundaries. From a single identity of for each fact comes a single version of the truth.