Identifying Characteristics and Roles of Olap in Business Decision Support Systems (2011)

INTRODUCTIONBusiness data is a vitally important, yet commonly unrealized asset for organizations. Throughout the years, operational data has often been collected and stored, becoming a potentially invaluable resource to business. However, operational data from transactional systems needs to be transformed into decision-support data before it can be easily used by executives for decision making. The business value in the operational data is, in a way, hidden from use until this transformation.Decision support systems provide business intelligence and other to assist in decision making at many levels with an organization (Sauter 2011). Business intelligence and often become the competitive differentiators for an enterprise (Liberatore and Luo 2010, Watson and Wixom 2007). DSS and BI can also greatly enhance enterprise knowledge management and customer relationship management (Cody et al. 2002, Micu et al. 2009). Yet, businesses find significant barriers to using more effectively. Wailgum suggests that the technology is available but issues involving people interfere with using analytic technology (Wailgum 2010). This position is further supported by KPMG International's estimates that businesses use as little as 20% of the resources and potential within the organization's current analytical tools (KPMG International 2009). It can then be inferred that learning more about BI holds great promise for enterprises.The great need for business to understand more about decision support systems, business intelligence and analytic techniques is confirmed through research. MIT Sloan Management Review and the IBM Institute for Business Value recently conducted an extensive survey on within organizations. The breadth of the survey is impressive as it was conducted in over 100 countries and across 30 industries. Respondents included analysts, managers and executives. A significant finding was that 38% of businesses identified the primary barrier to using BI more effectively ...as their own lack of understanding about how to use analytics (LaValle et al. 2010). Decision support systems used primarily for business intelligence are the focus for the remainder of the paper.Business intelligence is a broad framework that includes both data warehousing and information delivery systems enabling the hosting of decision support data and process analytics. Data warehousing stores decision-support data in specially designed architectures that differ from operational systems. A data warehouse (DW) by definition integrates data from multiple operational systems and is typically organized around a specific subject such as customer. In contrast to operational systems, the data warehouse stores historical data in summary form. Further, once the data are loaded in the data warehouse it remains stable, unlike an operational system in which data continuously changes.The data warehousing environment provides some decision-support data within architectures such as the star schema. However, a data warehouse can be complemented by sophisticated online tools that offer intensive decision support to end users. In the online tool, data are pre-processed and delivered to end users to more rapidly support decision making, business modeling, and operations research.THE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE FRAMEWORKData scattered across various operational systems cannot be used directly for supporting effective high-level decision making. As described earlier, decision support data are integrated, subject-oriented, time-variant, and nonvolatile. The data, stored in the DW, are snapshots of the business operation at a given point in time and are not subject to direct updates from the transactions in operational systems. Therefore operational data must be integrated and transformed into decision support data before it can be used within the BI systems. To facilitate top management's view of the business the data also has to be aligned with core business subject areas, such as customer, product, and region. …