Data Modeling

Adding Your Intelligence to the Business Intelligence Mix

After you (and others in your organization) have created your information repository, your next challenge is to organize it in a way such that it’s easy to use the data to manage meaningful business questions. This process is called data modelling, and it lies at the core of the process of creating true business intelligence content from raw business data.

An unlimited number of ways to look at data
The Indicee approach to data modelling allows every user to organize and label data and concepts in ways that make sense to him or her, but also allows users to share their models so that insights can be rapidly communicated across the organization.

Data and metadata: From bits and bytes to questions and answers
To understand the concept of modelling data at a high level, we need only a few concepts, among them data and metadata. To greatly simplify, you can think of data as the raw content that you upload, and metadata as the way you label that content so that you can manipulate it.  If you imagine a hierarchy of data, with lower levels corresponding to actual physical bits on a computer storage device, and higher levels corresponding to actual business questions, for example “how much profit did we make off our advertising campaign last quarter?” Data modeling is what ties the different levels together.

Between the lower, computer-centered data organization, and higher, business centered data organization, there are different levels of abstraction. Because the underlying data columns come from multiple sources, you need to map them to a set of fields that you use to build reports.

The Indicee information architecture is defined in terms of columns, fields, terms, and questions. You don’t need to understand what these expressions mean in to grasp the fundamental power of the Indicee approach.

In the process of modeling, you identify all the columns and the type of data they represent.

An Information Space for every user
When using Indicee Solutions, each user has a single active Information Space, which is a directory containing references to the business intelligence assets that the user may access from the system. After you’ve learned a few simple Indicee-specfic techniques, you’ll learn how to “model” the data in ways that make sense to you. That allows you to address the questions that most concern you. Every other user can model the same underlying data in ways that make send to them. And then, you can use things like dashboards, charts, reports and trend analysis packages to explore together the insights that your data is waiting to offer you.