An OO Approach to Designing Business Intelligence Systems

Abstract

While standard accounting needs tend to be relatively static, the demand for corporate managers to be constantly aware of changing business dynamics is ever present. Consequently, support systems, technical or otherwise, must be up to the challenge of responding to the demands of their users by incorporating available accounting data. This chapter explains how organizations can use object-oriented analysis and design techniques to more effectively create systems to respond to escalating business intelligence needs. Towards this end, we discuss the differences between business intelligence systems and operational accounting systems. We explain basic object-oriented software principles and how data and procedures are viewed within the object-oriented paradigm. We demonstrate how object-oriented systems can evolve more quickly in response to changing business intelligence needs than systems developed using more traditional (structured) methods. Finally, we provide an example demonstrating the application of these principles. The example demonstrates how the collection of retail sales data and the separate recording of advertising expenditures can be combined to address specific business intelligence questions. This allows us to demonstrate how data collected for specific accounting purposes can be rapidly manipulated and combined, to be used in a decision support, as opposed to the regulatory reporting, role.