Information Delivery and Consumption
Information delivery and consumption deals with a set of information delivery approaches and consumption styles through which the information processed from sourcing to various repositories can be consumed. The key delivery approaches in use are as follows:
§  Reports
Can be operational, canned, scheduled, or ad hoc in nature. Reports can be delivered through e-mail, portals, or through bursting mechanisms.
§  Scorecards/dashboards
Can be operational, tactical as well as strategic depending on the nature of analysis and end user base. Enterprises often use balanced scorecards and dashboards to monitor execution of strategy by measuring key result areas through a set of business critical KPIs. There could be lagging and leading indicators of business performance.
§  Activity monitoring
Business activity monitoring involves providing near real-time visibility into business activity and processes. This helps manage service level agreements with processes as well as providing visibility into process performance through dashboards.
§  Planning and budgeting
Planning and budgeting applications also consume data (like plan data) from the data warehouse and data marts. Outbound feeds serve as data inputs into planning and budgeting applications.
§  Analytics
Analytical tools often get data feeds from data warehouses and data marts. They also can read data from data marts as input for running analytical models for training the data and find insights.
§  Data mining
Data mining tools also often get feeds from data warehouses, ODS, or data marts depending on the nature of business question needed to answer.