I don't think I'm breaking any new ground here, but we've been dealing with some pain that I think is a direct result of not having a solid understanding of the logical model of the business.
I'm on a data warehouse team that sits between a data team that manages our line-of-business systems and a reporting team that builds tableau reports off of the data warehouse output. We also ingest data from a lot of external systems. Pretty standard, I think.
The data warehouse serves 2 purposes, it maintains the history of the data coming out of the source systems, and combines and transforms that data from the source systems into a format to be used by the reporting team.
I wasn't around when the warehouse was initially built, but I suspect its output more closely matched the business process back then, but even then there were a lot of concepts from their CRM system in the data warehouse output.
So, a couple questions:
- Who else is in the same boat and what are you doing about if?
- If this is a solved problem where you work, how did you solve it?
I think we're at the point where everybody understands the problem and we have a desired end-state in mind, but how do you start eating that elephant? I made a draft of a bus matrix to start with, that has facilitated a few conversations and I think is a small step in the right direction, but I really only understand the business process from a very high level.