Corporate Information Factory

CHAPTER 13

Decision Support Capabilities

The ultimate goal of the corporate information factory (CIF) is to get the right information into the right people’s hands when they need it. Much of what we have discussed so far covers the design and implementation of the infrastructure to accomplish this goal.

In this chapter, we focus on how these components work together to enable decision support capabilities.

First, we cover the decision support capabilities available today that are used to solve a business user’s difficult strategic and tactical problems. These capabilities use data marts for strategic analysis and oper-marts for tactical analysis. The foundation for the data marts is, of course, the data warehouse. The data warehouse not only supplies integrated, high-quality, static data to the marts, it also acts as the repository of strategic historical data. For these reasons and others, the data warehouse is a mandatory part of the strategic analysis infrastructure.

Data marts will be discussed next. These structures are subsets of strategic data provided by the data warehouse and have different database designs depending on the business problem(s) they solve. How and when to use the different types of data marts and data mart designs are discussed.

Next, we talk about two interesting forms of DSS applications coming to the fore in this environment: ERP applications and e-business. The ERP vendors are offering some interesting new strategic applications built from the strength ...