information, knowledge, and wisdom that should be recognized by the business
intelligence community.

Virtualization means many things to many people. In this context, they are defined to be
view-driven—whether or not they are implemented in a relational or nonrelational
technology. Views are logical collections of data (mostly structured) on top of physical
data storage. Note that it may not be a relational table anymore; it might be a key-value
pair store or a nonrelational file sitting in Hadoop.

The more virtualization (or views) that can be applied, the quicker and more responsive
the IT team is to change. In other words, less physical storage means less physical
management and maintenance costs. It also means faster reaction time for IT to
implement, test, and release changes back to the business.

What Is Managed Self-Service BI?

Unfortunately, there is a term called self-service BI being thrown about in the
marketplace. This was in the 1990s, something applied to federated query engines—
otherwise known as enterprise information integration (EII). The purpose and use for this
type of engine has morphed in to the cloud and virtualization space.

One of the marketing statements in the 1990s (by these vendors) was as follows: “You
don’t need a data warehouse...” The industry and the vendors learned that this simply
isn’t a true statement. It wasn’t true then, and it certainly isn’t true now. Data
warehouses (and business intelligence systems) are as important to the enterprise as the
operational systems are, because the enterprise warehouse captures an integrated view of
historical information, allowing gap analysis to occur across multiple systems.

If you give a child a bunch of finger paint (with no training and no instruction), will it
make them a master artist, or will they simply make a big mess?

If a child is taught what to do with finger paint and where to paint—then provided some
paper and paints—chances are they will paint on the paper instead of themselves. IT
wants business to succeed; IT should be an enabler, helping to integrate the proper paints
for the right colors and providing the paper along with basic instruction on how to get at
the information (Fig. 6.5.2).

Chapter 6.5: Introduction to Data Vault Implementation