The steps of BI (Business Intelligence)

• Requirements gathering
• Data Retrieval
• Data prep
• Data Modeling
• Dashboards/Reports

So this has been in the forefront of my mind lately. I’m working on a project (work-adjacent but not directly related) where I’m standing up a SQL server in Azure, creating a database on that server, then populating data to it that will then be added to going forward by a group of folks doing fungi research (no seriously). I’ve gotten all this done thus far and next comes the part where we try to come up with something that will allow ongoing data entry (that isn’t just to excel sheets that are uploaded). Also we’ll be doing some Power BI reporting. 

I am pretty novice at most of this so it’s been a challenge, but not a terrible one. It’s interesting in particular to dig into the concept of just where things (data, apps, etc.) live, which nowadays is even less clear than it was 10 years ago. You are looking at a table of data but where does that physically reside? Or is it even just one thing in one place? Oddly enough it ties in nicely to a book I just started recently, “We Are Legion, We Are Bob”. Bob died and his consciousness was copied as an AI that inhabits computer systems and can replicate itself. It’s trippy.