Designing BI Solutions in the Era of Big Data

ELTA stands for Extract, Load, Transform and Analyse. The authors define the ELTA term as follows: a process called Extract enables data extraction from the heterogeneous sources in heterogeneous formats (transactional data, machine generated data etc.); process Load provides ability to store data inside storage system; process named Transform provides ability to transform data from raw state (a) on demand and (b) according to the needs of decision making process; Analyse phase makes business users efficiently utilize preprocessed data to understand enterprise behavior through analysis.

Based on the Framework to Design a Business Intelligence Solution approach, a framework to define an Enterprise Architecture (EA) as solution's foundations is required. There are various EA frameworks. Among them, the Zachman Framework is selected as a base EA framework. Although the Zachman framework lacks in modelling for detailed EA components and relationships among them and does not provide concrete implementing method, it is valuable in the point that it presents general framework which every enterprise can use to build its own EA. Beside "the Zachman Framework is an ontology - a theory of the existence of a structured set of essential components of an object for which explicit expression is necessary, and perhaps even mandatory for creating, operating, and changing the object (the object being an enterprise, a department, a value chain, a solution, a project, an airplane, a building, a product, a profession, or whatever)". We are considering only the first four rows of the framework, which are defined as follows: (1) strategy model, (2) business model, (3) system model, and (4) technology model.

In accordance with the previously expressed, the proposed model is comprised by EA components, a Balanced Scorecard (BSC), BI components, and relationships between them as shown on Figure 1 as proposed model.