Implementing BI is more of a strategic initiative for many businesses, especially in the highly competitive environments of nearly all major industries.

While implementing and advancing current business analytics operations is often seen as a business-critical part of overall strategy, some of the finer points of implementation are overlooked, leading to costly mistakes and ongoing competitive weakness.

According to Oracle BI Architect and Consulting Manager at KPI Partners, Abhinav Banerjee, business intelligence implementations are often called failures when they fail to meet the required objectives, lack user acceptance or are only implemented after numerous long delays.

Banerjee, who has  experience advising institutions like NYU Medical Center and Ansell Healthcare on their data integration and BI strategies, says that one of the most common reasons for unsuccessful or delayed BI implementations is an improperly modeled repository not adhering to basic dimensional modeling principles.

He notes that “an improperly designed repository which did not follow dimensional modeling and data modeling principles and best practices leads to all three of the failures stated above.  The BI Repository (RPD) is heart of the BI Server and has all the complex business logic defined within. Banerjee says that there is a direct correlation between how well implemented all the logic in this repository is and how successful the final solution will be.

He urges those considering business intelligence implementations to consider that a repository that is not developed following the specified principles or is not well designed can lead to plethora of issues ranging from reporting errors, incorrect data, performance problems and a variety of other issues and all of which can lead to  issues with acceptance of the product.

Banerjee details the various principles that constitute the process of dimensional modeling and how one can build it properly in the RPD in a new freely-available guide available for download.

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