MAKING RELEVANT DATA AVAILABLE TO END USER ACCESS FOR USE IN DECISION-MAKING AND ISSUE RESOLUTION
Chapter 10 of Building a Better Data Warehouse (Meyer & Cannon, 1998) discusses in generalities some of the reasons that an organization might decide to develop a data warehouse. Chapter 10 also included a summary of problems that developers must solve in order to create an effective data warehouse. One of the problems requiring the development of solution for the creation of an effective data warehouse involves making it possible for the end user of a data warehouse to find, display, and analyze information for use in organizational decision-making and the resolution of issues. This research reviews the procedures presented in Building a Better Data Warehouse for application in solving this problem.
Meyer and Cannon (1998) deal with this issue in Chapter 8 of Building a Better Data Warehouse. The initial step is to select the appropriate end user tool for the development of the end user architecture in the data warehouse. Meyer and Cannon (1998) recommend the selection of "sophisticated query and reporting tools with a descriptive set of meta data" and "Point and click automatic report generating capabilities" (p. 89). Such tools require the use of on-line analytical processing (OLAP) and relational OLAP (ROLAP) technologies. Meyer and Cannon (1998) suggest the use of a ROLAP end user tool architecture that includes the following elements:
A data warehouse constructed as a relational data base management system (RDMBS)
A Meta Data identification system for the RDMBS data warehouse
An OLAP data engine that will drive search and retrieval operations
A multi dimensional data (MDD) query tool that will allow end users to interact with the system
The operational process allowing end users to make optimal use of a data warehouse is data mining, which is the process of "discovering, meaningful new correlations, patter...