Blog: Dan E. Linstedt

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Operational Data Warehousing / Active Data Warehousing

There's a lot of stir in the market place these days with a term called: Operational Business Intelligence, over the years there's been a lot of interest and usage of the term: Active Data Warehousing, which according to Bill Inmon is really: "real-time data warehousing" or "operational data warehousing." What is this thing? Has it been defined before? What kinds of systems are we building these days and what is the next stage going forward? In this entry we'll look at the terms Operational Data Warehousing, Operational Business Intelligence, and Active Data Warehousing...

For the past several years there's a growing trend in learning from the history of the strategic data warehouse, placing that knowledge nugget into a running artificially intelligent engine (live neural net) and then sending an operational transaction through the mix. Why? For one instance: fraud detection.

The AI engine needs to learn from the patterns stored in the strategic elements of the warehouse, then it needs to apply (in right-time) what it knows to the incoming transaction to determine if it's fake, fraudulent, or simply undesired action. All the while it also needs to build up an "operational view" of a stream of transactions arriving within a specific time-frame, so that it can uncover recurring fraud within a short period of time.

What is all this?
Some folks have called it Operational Business Intelligence (see Claudia Imhoff's article) In fact, this is the right name for it... It's the ability to perform action on data that makes sense to the business _when_ it makes sense to perform that action... Huh?

Right-time data arrival, coupled with strategic learning, coupled with neural nets to put the current transaction into "context", and then produce an actionable result for the business to operate from. Operational Business Intelligence.

Ok, the ability to have Operational BI almost demands that we build an Operational Data Warehouse right?
Wrong. It's not always the right choice, however once a data warehouse architecture has been "activated" - the next step or next level is turning it on to an Operational level. It's nothing more, nothing less than the next step or the next evolution of an Active Data Warehouse. ** you can find lots of definitions of Active Data Warehouse in the market, so I didn't feel the need to rehash it.

Operational Data Warehousing??? impossible you say...
Not really. In fact, it takes on the notions of Operational BI and actually enables Operational BI to engage directly with the Data Warehousing levels. But it requires some sophisticated machinery, architectures, and standards. The notions of the Data Warehouse becoming a System Of Record for Operational Data are a reality with Operational DW.

In fact, some of the requirements of an Operational DW are as follows:
* It must already be an Active or Right-Time Data Warehouse
* It must contain data captured by the Data Warehouse as "source data" that is never altered, and adheres to the DW2.0 principles.
* It must have integrated information, time-variant (strategic), non-volatile information
* It must have an operational business purpose that it addresses going forward

What happens to the system housing an ODW?
* It is now truly 24x7x365
* it is a system-of-record
* it might be a master-data-system
* It answers business questions directly
* It captures operational data from web-interfaces, web-services, that doesn't exist anywhere else.
* It maintains partial levels of business rules for capturing the information just discussed.
* it maintains master metadata across the enterprise
* It maintains security to all the information

And so on... All the principles of "operational systems" are added to all the principles of an "active data warehouse", which are added to the requirements from Operational Business Intelligence - to make up an Operational Data Warehouse.

We'll continue discussing this topic moving forward, as always this is bleeding edge? maybe not... but I'd love to hear your opinions - help me formulate the definitions in the market place, or simply tell me that "no such thing exists..."

Thanks,
Dan L
DanL@GeneseeAcademy.com

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