Even when you have developed and delivered your BI project successfully on-schedule and on-budget the task is not completed. To be really successful and beneficial to your business you have to conduct a successful organizational implementation including orchestrating the necessary tasks for maintenance and further development.

While we elsewhere on these pages discusses the challenges in organizational implementation of BI from other angles we will in this article focus on the specific challenges regarding the ever on going needs for keeping metadata versioning and business rules up-to-date.

Recommendation

ebs.dk recommends that the integration of SQL Server Master Data Management in SSIS with SharePoint as a front end should be considered as a highly feasible and very cost effective means for the support of Data Warehouse maintenance.

The maintenance challenge

In our experience the burden of keeping master data versioning and business rules up-to-date is very heavy to lift for many organizations leading to high expenditures and / or degrading quality of otherwise perfectly implemented adequate BI solutions.

A major challenge for any BI data warehousing project is issues with data quality. Furthermore the organization of the necessary but often less respected and glorified task of cleansing data before these are utilized for analysis and other business support via the data warehouses can be less obvious.

A commonly seen example of this is when business users expect the IT department to “just simply” clean up the data not realizing IT’ needs for well documented; up-to-date and probably even versioned business rules in order to effectively clean up the data. Without well documented business rules the on-going data

cleansing can take excessive tolls on resources or even fail. A way to avoid this situation is to “empower” the business users and give them a means to manage their own data.

SQL Server Master Data Management to the rescue

Integrating the new SQL Server’ Master Data Management (SSMDM) services present a relatively simple method to allow users to manage their own data.

ebs.dk has good experiences in integrating SSMDM to SQL Server Integration Services that perform the actual cleansing and data warehouse building as well as providing a productive user front end for the business users in SharePoint Server. Thus the data cleansing processes could benefit for the effort that many organizations already put into management of master data in general.

There are many Master Data Management tools available in the market, however, these are often expensive or difficult to use. Allowing users to manage their data within SharePoint allows them to use an environment they are comfortable with and leverage other out of the box SharePoint functionality such as search, collaboration and security management.

SQL Server Master Data Management Services that Microsoft has built into SQL Server 2008R2 from the in 2007 acquired Stratature +EDM product is functionally almost identical to +EDM with some enhancements to the out of box experience, simplified setup, improvements to the API, better integration into other applications, and better integration with the Microsoft data platform. The product is not “state-of-the-art” Master Data Management but is sufficient mature and comprehensive for implementation in even advanced scenarios. Furthermore SQL Server Master Data Services – as most Microsoft’ BI products – comes “for free”! – I.e. is included in the SQL Server License fee.