Business Intelligence Jargon Buster

Business Intelligence
Jargon Buster
All the business user ever needs to know
about terms, definitions, and meanings
Presented by Donna Kelly
© Redwing Business Intelligence Ltd 2011 - 2014 BI General Slide 1

Facts
• Every business has business processes
• Each business process generates events of
interest
• For example, you’re a retailer, and you sell
clothes. Today, I bought a dress. That’s an
event of interest to the business.
• That thing that just happened? That’s a fact.

Measures
• Facts are associated with numbers.
• The sale event was of a dress.
• The gross price was £89
• The sales tax rate was 20%
• The net price was £106.80
• The quantity was 1
• There are 4 things I can add up, or putting it
another way, the Fact has 4 Measures

Dimensions
• Facts don’t just float in the ether. Facts have
context within the business.
• That dress I bought? It was at a specific store,
on a specific date, for a specific product.
• I could add up the Measures of the Sale Fact
by Location, by Product, by Date.
• Whenever you hear the word by you have just
heard a Dimension
• Dimensions fix Facts in space and time

Cubes
Cubes are the heart of business
intelligence systems.
Every dimension is an edge of the
cube (and yes, there can be more
than three . . . for example, the
Redwing Hospital Data Warehouse
currently has about 130 dimensions)
This picture shows 3 dimensions,
and the cube can be sliced by
location, by product, and by date.
Each little box in the picture is a
Fact, and it holds all the Measures
of that Fact (like gross price or tax).

Slicing and Dicing
I can cut the data. I can slice the cube, to add up measures for some dimensions.
It’s also possible to dice the data into the smallest pieces, and look at single facts.

The Enterprise Bus Matrix
a.k.a. the Dimensional Model
“The Enterprise Bus Matrix is a data
warehouse planning and modelling
tool and model created by Ralph
Kimball” (Wikipedia)
The top picture show the original
concept. The idea is that the facts
from business processes plug into
pre-defined dimensions. (Like a bus
in a personal computer).
The lower picture shows how it
works in practice. As each business
process is added to the system, any
new dimensions are created. This
means that there’s no concept of a
stand-alone data warehouse project.

Metrics
• A metric is a number that comes out of a cube
and is reported to the business user
• Measures are not necessarily metrics. For
example, I could output the ratio of two
measures as a metric, but never report on the
original measures.
• All aggregated numbers are necessarily
metrics, because they’re created in the cube
for the purpose of business reporting.

Key Performance Indicators
A Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
is the comparison of an Actual to
a Target.
Often, the Actual is a metric from
the cube and the Target is a
hardcoded number or percentage.
Sometimes, the target is itself
taken from the cube as a measure
that was input earlier.
In any case, there is always a
comparison method (such as
increasing is better), and a trend
Indicator (e.g. a traffic light).
KPIs are always calculated in the
cube, and never in reports.

Scorecard
1. Create the KPIs (in the cube)
2. Create the visual Indicators for the
report
3. Create the Scorecard which is a
grouping of (typically) rolled-up
KPIs
A scorecard is a high-level snapshot
of organizational performance.
Scorecards display a collection of key
performance indicators (KPIs) and
the performance targets for those
KPIs.
When you create a scorecard, you
typically create an upper-level group
of objectives that represent the
various performance goals for a
group or an organization. Then, you
can populate those objectives with
other KPIs that represent the sub-
objectives for each KPI. (Microsoft)

Dashboard
A dashboard is a container for various types
of reports, including scorecards.
It might consist of one or more pages, and it
might have more than one module on each
page.
The modules are called Web Parts. A typical
dashboard might contain a scorecard, an
analytic report, alerts, and an analytic
chart, but many variations are possible.
Some dashboards provide users with a high
level of interactivity, and others display
static images. In all cases, dashboards
reflect the requirements of their audience.

Recap
• Fact: An event of interest to the business.
• Measure: A number we can add up.
• Dimension: Context for Facts BY (dimension).
• Cube. The one source of the truth.
• Metric. Number from a cube used for reports.
• KPI. Actual (metric) compared to a Target.
• Scorecard. Displays a collection of KPIs.
• Dashboard. A container for scorecards etc.

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