As an avid student of Larissa T. Moss’s earlier book, Business Intelligence Roadmap, I was excited to see her latest work. That earlier book helped me to understand the steps needed in the successful business intelligence effort that meets the objectives of business. The new book is up to the task. Be ready to think like a senior business leader rather than as a database designer who is concerned with designing tables and columns.
The author provides a framework to aid in understanding Enterprise Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence (DW/BI). She explains that data management is a process of assuring that a high quality integrated source of data while data delivery makes the data accessible for business intelligence and analysis. The TDWI BI Components Framework is used as starting point to explain the architecture of DW/BI.
The strengths and weaknesses of EDW/BI methodologies are illustrated and lead up to the best practice approach described by the author. Methodologies examined include: waterfall, spiral, agile programming, agile data warehouse and the BI Roadmap with Extreme Scoping. Larrisa T. Moss has organized the data warehousing and business intelligence process into defined activities and deliverables; and then explains the purpose and structure of each activity and deliverable. In addition, the appendices of the book provide helpful details and references.
The book does focus on BI rather than Data Mining. It does identify high level Data Mining activities, but does not address topics such as: market basket analysis, customer profitability analysis, regression, decision trees and segmentation. The book’s strength is showing how to obtain and manage data that is the key input to Data Mining.
I give this book kudos and find it inspiring – it is what I would wish for in great book about leading successful EDW/BI programs. I will be using what I have learned in my EDW/BI efforts. The topics are very current. The best practice methodology is right on for meeting today’s EDW/BI challenges. Thumbs up for Extreme Scoping by Larissa T. Moss.