Gathering the report
and dashboard requirements for a datawarehousing project at an end client is a very specialized task. M&N Business Intelligence
follows a set methodology for gathering report requirements.
· Understand the business process:
this is done by process modeling and by data modeling.
· Conducting
the end client interviews.
· Understanding the daily
canned report requirements. These normally include understanding the current spreadsheets been used by the end client.
The entire purpose of the above exercise is to
understand the following:
·
What is to be reported?
· To whom
are the facts to be reported?
· When the
reports are to be delivered and in what format?
· To what granularity level are
the details to be reported to various end users. This helps in understanding the drill down and drill through parameters.
There are some basic tenets that need to be
understood while gathering the reporting requirements.
Measures:
these are the numbers such as sales, cost that need to be reported. These figures could come directly from the tables, could
be generated as custom measures during cube formation or could be generated as reporting variables. Depending upon our understanding
of how, by whom a particular measure is to be used, we decide how the measure shall be created.
Dimensions: these are the groups by and the filter parameters
for various measures. There are primarily 2 types of dimension entities used for reporting purposes. Type-1 dimension entails
capturing only the current data, while type-2 dimension entails capturing the historical data.
The dimension entities could be a list of attributes
like that of a person or a hierarchy as in the case of say region-district.
Conformed dimensions: certain
type of dimension entities need to be standardized across the whole organization such as date. They are called conformed dimensions.
Aggregates: sometime the measures
need to be looked at a higher level of granularity. For example say the management of a company desires to look at the cashflow
only in terms of monthly figures. In such cases we generate aggregates.
Report
requirements gathering process: In this part of the analysis we gather all the tactical and the strategic reporting
requirements.
We are attaching a sample
report gathering requirement document for your consideration. You can get the same by submitting your e-mail address to our
team.
