Mining Legacy Data for Valuable Business Intelligence

by Peter H. Aiken

To increase the effectiveness of your organization's business intelligence (BI) investments, you must first look to your existing environment in order to harvest valuable but easy-to-obtain metadata. Using this metadata can provide the foundation for BI investments. Understanding how BI efforts can be assisted by effective business rule extraction capabilities will allow you to determine appropriate additional investments. BI typically is defined as "increased abilities to use information in support of organizational strategy." These abilities focus on meaningfully informing those involved in the decisionmaking process. (The range of decisions benefiting from better managed metadata might extend from modifying the nature of the question being asked to providing increased awareness of the type of data required to address the challenge.) Increased BI abilities depend highly on implementing organizational metadata management maturely [1].