Data Analysis in Business Intelligence: Unlike the production system you’ve worked with for years, this Business Intelligence system contains seemingly strange files that appear to contain both system and user data. As you start to learn more about these files and try to decipher the meaning of apparently incomprehensible acronyms, you wonder just how you will access the necessary data to solve this request.

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Introduction

Imagine you work with one of your organization’s mission-critical operational systems. Your organization considers you the go-to person for any query or reporting request associated with this system.

What if your CEO were to ask you to modify one of your year-end reports to compare this year’s numbers to those from the two previous years? Unfortunately, the operational system you are reporting off of only stores current-year detail records and prior-year summary balances. The summary balances from two years ago were purged from the system at the beginning of this year. When you try to explain this to the CEO, all you hear is, “So how long will it take to find the lost data?”

Your medium-sized company is publicly held and under the Sarbanes-Oxley act your CEO and CFO must certify the accuracy of its financial statements based on data from several internal systems and spreadsheets. In a recent conversation, the CFO asked you to confirm the roll-ups in these reports were trustworthy; that they were timely, auditable, and not based on “adding apples to oranges.”

In addition to the requests from the CEO and CFO, you receive another request to produce a report from a commercial enterprise application software package your company has recently implemented. Unlike the production system you’ve worked with for years, this system contains seemingly strange files that appear to contain both system and user data. As you start to learn more about these files and try to decipher the meaning of apparently incomprehensible acronyms, you wonder just how you will access the necessary data to solve this request.