Mastering the SAP Business Information Warehouse: Leveraging the Business Intelligence Capabilities of SAP NetWeaver, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 1The Origins of Business Intelligence

The origins of business intelligence may be traced to the first data-processing applications such as accounts payable and receivable. These applications ran on sequential technology (such as magnetic and paper tapes). Using sequential media for storage meant the entire file had to be accessed, even if only a fraction of the file was needed. Oxide often stripped off of magnetic tapes, and entire files were lost. These issues led to the need for a new way to analyze information.

This chapter discusses how enterprises tackled the challenges of extracting data from online transaction-processing systems, dealing with poor data quality, and structuring data. This discussion describes what a data warehouse is from its data model, table structure, granularity, and support of historical data and how it fits into a broader intellectual concept called the corporate information factory (CIF). While the CIF was evolving, so was SAP, until finally the two converged.

Evolution of Information Processing

The computer profession is historically immature. Other professions have been around for millennia. In caves in Chile, bones have been found showing that humankind practiced medicine (in at least a crude form) as long as 10,000 years ago. In Rome, walls and streets are used today that engineers built before the time of Christ. In Egypt, hieroglyphs on the walls of the tombs indicate that an accountant declared that wheat was owed the Pharaoh 3,000 ...