Applying Business Rules
Imagine the scenario that you receive an order on January 31st. You ship the item on February 15th. You receive payment on March 2nd. For which month would you ring up the sale? In some companies individuals are left up to their own discretion, which means that everyone has a different number for sales figures.

Documenting standards for applying business rules can help save a great deal of aggravation and confusion. Business rules are a big part of what transforms captured raw data into usable information. The transformation process needs to be defined for everyone within the company.

Capturing Data
Information is captured in sales systems, customer relation systems and operational systems. There are two standards for capturing this data: uniformity and adherence.

Uniformity basically means having a sameness quality in the data. A good example of uniform data is the use of the same customer number for the same customer in different systems. If you sell widgets to John Doe, Inc. and you record the sale under customer number 25, you’ll want to make sure your shipping system also shows that customer number 25 is John Doe. This helps to insure you can link your data correctly.

Adherence refers to legally required information. If you make a sale, you have to have a method to capture it for sales tax, income tax and perhaps other criteria. By making sure there is a process by which all legally required information is captured in a uniform and cohesive manner, you can save yourself plenty of headaches down the road.

Talk to someone who’s been working in the field of business intelligence for awhile and you could hear an earful about warehouses, star schemas and data mining. It’s almost enough to scare a “newbie” from ever jumping into the field. Yet, the fact is that all businesses engage in some type of business intelligence, and having a data warehouse is not a prerequisite for great business intelligence.

Business intelligence does imply the use of technologies, but it encompasses so much more. It defines a methodology of how a business captures data and turns it into information that can be used to make decisions. Although businesses use this process on a daily basis, most businesses don’t put standards to the process to ensure the quality of their information. In my next few posts I will talk about capturing data, applying business rules and making decisions.