Bi Architecture

The success of a good business intelligence / datawarehousing system depends among many things on good systems design. The BI / DW architecture is the plumbing that supports all the customer-facing analytics and intelligence applications that are used by the business to drive good decision-making every day.

At Kindle Consulting, we have years of experience and deep technical skills designing and deploying systems for harnessing and delivering corporate information. As shown in the illustration above, the BI stack stretches far and wide and often includes a amalgam of disparate technologies and vendor solutions, most times owned by different entities within the same organization. Our experience allows us to design systems that are reliable, fault-tolerant and that are fast. Performance is a very important consideration in the design of BI Systems and our experience has bred in us a culture of sub-optimizing every link within the corporate information value chain to achieve this objective.

As they mature, BI systems grow in complexity as more and more source systems are added to the information delivery pipeline (ERP applications, application interfaces, messaging queues, files etc...). Having good design practices baked into the architecture is critical to avoiding having to pull out the plumbing half-way down the road to accomodate changes. Aside from the obvious time and labor costs, the most expensive overhead of poor or inefficient design is questionable or poor data quality.

Our Toolbox

The Data Warehouse Institute is a well-respected, platform-agnostic thought leader in the business intelligence and datawarehouse markets. In addition to providing great training on the principles of data warehousing and business intelligence, they are a great access point for industry news as well as weekly webinars and podcasts on hot BI / DW topics.