读《数据仓库工具箱：维度建模的完全指南》之第三章价值链整合

Value Chain Integration

价值链整合

 

Now that we’ve completed the design of three inventory model variations,

let’srevisit our earlier discussion about the retailer’s value chain. Both the

business and IT organizations typically are very interested in value chain integration.

Low-level business analysts may not feel much urgency, but those in

the higher ranks of management are very aware of the need to look across the

business to better evaluate performance. Numerous data warehouse projects

have focused recently on management’s need to better understand customer

relationships from an end-to-end perspective. Obviously, this requires the

ability to look consistently at customer information across processes, such as

quotes, orders, invoicing, payments, and customer service. Even if your management’s

vision is not so lofty, business users certainly are tired of getting

reports that don’t match from different systems or teams.

现在我们完成了三个库存变动模型的设计。让我们回到早期关于零售价值链的讨论。业务

和IT部门都对价值链整合非常感兴趣。低级别的业务分析员或许感觉没有那么急迫，但是那些高级别范围的管理部门非常急切的想看到更好的业务管理效率。很多数据仓库项目都把注意力放在了管理部门想更好的了解客户的需求上。很明显，这需要拥有通过流程看明白客户信息的能力，比如报价，订单，开票，付款和客户服务流程。即使你们管理能力没有这么高，业务用户会为从不同的系统或项目组拿不到匹配报表感到厌烦。

IT managers know all too well that integration is needed to deliver on the

promises of data warehousing. Many consider it their fiduciary responsibility

to manage the organization’s information assets. They know that they’re not

fulfilling their responsibilities if they allow standalone, nonintegrated databases

to proliferate. In addition to better addressing the business’s needs, the

IT organization also benefits from integration because it allows the organization

to better leverage scarce resources and gain efficiencies through the use of

reusable components.

 

Fortunately, the folks who typically are most interested in integration also

have the necessary organizational influence and economic willpower to make

it happen. If they don’t place a high value on integration, then you’re facing a

much more serious organizational challenge. It shouldn’t be the sole responsibility

of the data warehouse manager to garner organizational consensus for

an integrated warehouse architecture across the value chain. The political support

of senior management is very important. It takes the data warehouse

manager off the hook and places the burden of the decision-making process on

senior management’s shoulders, where it belongs.

高级别的管理部门应该是数据仓库经理的支持者。

In Chapters 1 and 2 we modeled data from several processes of the value

chain. While separate fact tables in separate data marts represent the data from

each process, the models share several common business dimensions, namely,

date, product, and store. We’ve logically represented this dimension sharing in

Figure 3.6. Using shared, common dimensions is absolutely critical to designing

data marts that can be integrated. They allow us to combine performance

measurements from different processes in a single report. We use multipass

SQL to query each data mart separately, and then we outer join the query

results based on a common dimension attribute. This linkage, often referred to

as drill across, is straightforward if the dimension table attributes are identical.

 

不同价值链的数据模型拥有共同的纬度，我们就可以在单一报表中将不同流程

的效率度量联合起来。