Canadian Tires
1. What is BI and how can it help Canadian Tire? In the case there are 10 common challenges of BI implementations, which of these would you rate as most important for Eubanks and Wnek at CTC, and why? How would you address them? Business Intelligence (BI) is the consolidation and analysis of internal data and / or external data for the purpose of effective decision-making. At the core of all BI initiatives is a data warehouse to hold the data and analytics software. The data warehouse stores data from operational systems in the organization and restructures it to enable queries and models to extract decision support reports. The primary objective of BI was to support and enable business and IT strategies at CTC. In the architecture prior to implementing company-wide BI, there were major challenges such as multiple independent data sources not included in Information Warehouse (IW), lack of standard data definitions and consequent inaccuracies in the data, the strained resources associated with storage and querying the IW, and the increasing delays and denial of access to information required by the end-users. The purpose of BI implementation was to eliminate all these problems and facilitate better information for business decision-making. Data quality and integration proved to be the biggest challenge at CTC. As the company’s IW grew dramatically after 1994, it was evolving on old infrastructure and a poorly defined data model. The data model did not reflect the data requirements of the business and because of the lack of standard data definitions, several versions of the truth could be extracted from IW. This could be addressed through proper data sourcing, data management and data integration across the company. Historical data needed to be organized according to standard data formats and housed in the central data warehouse, and there had to be simple and easy-to-update access to meta-data. BI specialists should assist in organizing the data