Chapter 5. The Blueprint

Before beginning your business intelligence and data warehousing build, it is important to have a high-level plan. The blueprint outlines the journey and the destination of the solution. The blueprint is essential to communicate the clear vision of the solution. The following recipes will assist to define this clear vision:

• Outlining your business processes

• Categorizing your metrics, analyses, and reports within the business process

• Decomposing your analysis and reports to define business entities

• Developing your semantic data model

• Identifying the source of record for your business entities

• Building the blueprint

Introduction

To build a blueprint effectively, it is important to gather sufficient information to gain an understanding of the requirements and the scope of the required solution, but not so much information that you end up in detailed requirements gathering. A good rule at this stage is to limit the requirements to single lines that outline the intent and the...