'Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought Alice; 'but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!'
--Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Several years ago, I sat in a local Cognos user's group meeting, listening to one of our clients give a presentation about the way she used Cognos Impromptu for her extensive reporting requirements. She gave a good presentation. She discussed limitations of her company's AS400 source system reporting capabilities and how Impromptu expanded her options.
She never once mentioned the data mart I had built - from two separate AS400 ERP systems, Excel and other supplementary data - on which all of the Impromptu reporting was based.
She didn't know it was there.
If she did, she didn't consciously consider the data mart as an entity separate from the presentation tool . Impromptu was her only experience with the data - and the Impromptu catalog insulates the end user from the complexities of its source data. That's its purpose - and the business analyst in charge of maintaining the catalog did an excellent job getting Impromptu to live up to that purpose.
Result? The Cheshire Data Mart - a data mart that was so successful, it disappeared from view entirely.
We had a good chuckle over this at our own expense. However, over time, we've found the same situation arising with other data mart projects. Since our clients tend to be mid-market companies, many of whom have small IT departments, the consumers of the data mart business intelligence data can be several layers removed from the actual implementation of the data mart.
If the only experience a user has with the data mart is as a consumer of output through some application or third-party reporting tool, that user is less likely to think of the data as something discrete. If they can see data in the UI, then the data must actually be in that UI right there. A part of it. Not something that has to be separately considered and maintained.
Unless you're a confirmed data junkie like me, the concept of data in the abstract is just one more yawn-inducing geekoid topic that causes your eyes to glaze over and the fight-or-flight reflex to kick in. (I know from the number of times I've tried - unsuccessfully - to explain my job to my children and friends.) The average business intelligence consumer may not prepared to think about the data decoupled from its presentation, and perhaps that's okay. But someone within the organization needs to remain cognizant of Cheshire Data Mart lurking out there so that future decisions about how the data mart should grow and evolve - and how business users can take advantage of the richness of data available in the mart for their use - can be made appropriately.
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