Here’s a scenario:

A Business Intelligence (BI) system for Sales is being developed at a company. Here are the events that occur:

1) Based on the requirements, It is documented that the Business needs to analyze Sales numbers by product, month, customer & employee

2) While designing the system IT learns that the data is stored at each Invoice Level but since the requirements document doesn’t say anything about having details down to invoice level, they decide to aggregate data before bringing in their system.

3) They develop the BI system within the time frame and sends it to business for data validation.

4) Business Analysts starts looking at the BI system and finds some numbers that don’t look right for a few products and need to see Invoices for those products to make sure that the data is right so they ask IT to give them invoice level data.

5) IT realizes that even though business had not requested Invoice Level data explicitly but they do NEED the lowest level data! They realize it’s crucial to pass data validation. Also, they talk with their business analysts and found out that they may  sometimes need to drill down to lowest level data to find insights that may be hidden at the aggregate level.

6) so IT decides to re-work on their solution. This increases the timeline & budget set for the project. Not only that they have lost the opportunity to gain the confidence of business by missing the budget and timeline.

7) They learn to “Design BI system to have the lowest level data even if it’s not asked!” and decides to never make this mistake again in the future!

This concludes the post and it’s important to include lowest level data in your BI system even if it’s not explicitly requested – this will save you time & build your credibility as a Business Intelligence developer/architect.