Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Dimensional Nature of Business

Dimensional Nature of Business
Data fortunately, the situation is not as hopeless as it seems. Even though the users cannot fully describe what they want in a data warehouse, they can provide you with very important insights into how they think about the business. They can tell you what measurement units are important for them. Each user department can let you know how they measure success in that particular department. The users can give you insights into how they combine the various pieces of information for strategic decision making.

Managers think of the business in terms of business dimensions. Figure 5-1 shows the kinds of questions managers are likely to ask for decision making. The figure shows what questions a typical Marketing Vice President, a Marketing Manager, and a Financial Consulter may ask.


Figure 5-1 Managers think in Business Dimensional

Let us briefly examine these questions. The Marketing Vice President is interested in the revenue generated by her new product, but she is not interested in a single number. She is interested in the revenue numbers by month, in a certain division, by demographic, by sales office relative to the previous product version, and compared to plan. So the Marketing Vice President wants the revenue numbers broken down by month, division, customers demographic, sales office, product version, and idin. These are her business dimensions along which she wants to analyze her numbers.

Similarly, for the Marketing Manager, his business dimensions arc product, product category, time (day, week, month), sale district and distribution channel. For the Financial Controller, the business dimensions are budget line, time (month, quarter and years), district, and division.

If your users of the data warehouse think in terms of business dimensions for decision making, you should also think of business dimensions while collecting requirements. Although the actual proposed usage of a data warehouse could be unclear, the business dimensions used by the managers for decision making are not nebulous at all. The users will be able to describe these business dimensions to you. You are not totally lost iii the process of requirements definition. YOU can find out about the business dimensions.

Let us try to get a good grasp of the dimensional nature of' business data. Figure 5-2 shows the analysis of sales units along the three business dimensions of product, time, and geography. These three dimensions arc plotted against three axes of coordinates. You will see that the three dimensions form a collection of cubes. In each of the small dimensional cubes, you will find the sales units for that particular slice of time product and geographical division. In this case, the business data of sales units is three dimensional because there are just three dimensions used in this analysis. 


Figure 5-2 Dimensional nature of business data 
If there are inure than three dimensions, we extend the concept to multiple dimensions and visualize multidimensional cubes, also called hypercube.

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