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What is the best approach to get an integrated view of information of both my finance and sales/production systems?

Question: I have a finance system and another system which does sales, production, etc. in my small to medium-size company: what is the best approach to get an integrated view of information of both systems? I have been told my options are a dashboard; enterprise information integration (EII, something about virtual SQL); or data warehousing (ETL)? It's about getting the finance side and operation side of the business in one view dynamically. Which of these options would you suggest?

Larissa Moss' Answer: Dashboard, enterprise information integration (EII) and DW/ETL are not mutually exclusive. A dashboard is a type of presentation display or presentation layer used as a front-end user interface. EII is middleware that allows you to "virtually" extract operational source data, merge it (link it) and present it to the end user without having to "park" (store) the data in a persistent database first. ETL is the process of physically extracting, cleansing, enhancing, merging (linking) and parking (storing) the enriched operational source data in a persistent DW database (or data marts), which can then be reused for other BI purposes. Depending on the scope and the goals of your BI initiative, the number of unique versus common reporting requirements, the quality of your source data, and even the types of users you have to support, your BI strategy can include any or all of these methods.

Chuck Kelley's Answer: Your options listed (as I read them) are like asking, "What type of fruit should I eat - banana or strawberries?" The answer depends on what you are trying to accomplish. (Here is the information to help understand the analogy - if you are really hungry (i.e., not full), then you probably want two cups of strawberries in order to fill you up with volume. If you are not real hungry (i.e., relatively full), then you should eat the banana. Both will give you the right amount of calories, but it is about volumes.)

Dashboards are a presentation layer that can be built on a data warehouse or an EII/EAI middleware environment. So I my questions to you would be 1) how much data, 2) what kind of usage (single item vs. aggregation), and 3) how much excess capacity do you have on your source systems. If either #1 is lots or #2 is aggregation or #3 is not much, then I probably would stay away from EII/EAI. If #1 is not much or # 2 is single, then maybe you could do EII/EAI.

Regardless, you could build your dashboard on either the EII/EAI or the data warehouse.

So in short, my answer is "it depends" on your environment and what you are trying to accomplish.


Larissa Moss is founder and president of Method Focus Inc., a company specializing in improving the quality of business information systems. She has more than 20 years of IT experience with information asset management. Moss is coauthor of three books: Data Warehouse Project Management (Addison-Wesley, 2000), Impossible Data Warehouse Situations (Addison-Wesley, 2002) and Business Intelligence Roadmap: The Complete Project Lifecycle for Decision- Support Applications (Addison-Wesley, 2003). Moss can be reached at methodfocus@earthlink.net.

Chuck Kelley is an internationally known expert in database and data warehousing technology. He has 30 years of experience in designing and implementing operational/production systems and data warehouses. Kelley has worked in some facet of the design and implementation phase of more than 50 data warehouses and data marts. He also teaches seminars, co-authored four books on data warehousing and has been published in many trade magazines on database technology, data warehousing and enterprise data strategies. He can be contacted at chuckkelley@usa.net.

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