Should You Build BI Before You Clean Your Data?

Implementing a business intelligence environment against data you don't trust?  Sounds counter-intuitive, some would say: ‘just plain wrong.'  How could you possibly build a data warehouse and cubes on data that might not be accurate?  You shouldn't of course, and that is the point. Accurate data is the non-negotiable cornerstone of any BI effort. 

But accurate data does not happen by itself.  Data needs to be enthusiastically governed to a state of truth and reliability, and this is a big job.  So big in fact, that attempting a global data governance initiative can cost so much time and energy as to obliterate the initiatives it was designed to support in the first place.

If your company has an urgent need to manage to 3 or 4 KPI's around inv...

read more