The User-to-Data pattern encompasses the provision of Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities to an organization.
The user is someone connected to the data through one of four paths:
- Internet: the user is external to the company, or an agent of the company. Note the possibility of a ‘chaining’ effect: the external user can trigger the user-to-data scenario while the user actually connected to the data is an internal staff member or agent. For example, a customer phones a query into an organization and a staff member connects to a data store to respond to the query. In this scenario, the user is defined as the staff member, not the customer.
- Intranet: a staff (internal) user.
- Extranet or privileged Internet: an associate of the client’s organization who acts as a business agent on the company’s behalf.
- Fat client-connected as in a client-server system: applies to internal users only.
The data can be held in a:
- Web-content store: holding Web pages and cached information. The data may include copies of operational detailed records, such as consolidated account information for a customer reference. The data is read-only; if an update of the data is required, the pattern is User-Business, not User-Data.
- Data mart: the data may be read-write with local scope-of-effect only.
- Data warehouse: the data is read-only for applications.
- Tool-specific store (proprietary): some tools, such as Essbase, require specialized data stores for efficiency.
This pattern has several distinguishing characteristics:
- The user is not connecting to a traditional transactional system performing an operational business process.
- The user perceives himself to be interacting directly with the data rather than with a system.
- Normally, the user has significant freedom and flexibility in her access of available data. The data sets are often specially prepared in advance to suit the user or the tool she is using.
-
The data sets being accessed:
- are not the company’s prime operational data.
- include a copy of relevant operational data and other data as necessary.
- include a historical set of data.