General Ledgers, Chart of accounts, Cost centers, Organisational Structure, Product lines, Sales Territory … the list of these Enterprise lists are far too many too mention, Hierarchy management in BI is essentially the discipline of defining and manipulating these enterprise data lists for the purpose of improving analysis of business processes and stream line the process of information integration.

Found an excellent article at tdwi talking about how an abstracted analysis layer for hierarchies can help organisations maintain competitive advantage by opening new realm of flexible analytics by allowing its business users to create their own alternate views of the organization and ask questions.

A powerful, flexible Hierarchy Management is one of the most important & interesting module of an MDM. One of my biggest qualms when designing a MDM in the SQLServer 2000/ 2005 was the lack of an efficient way to store & traverse data stored in tree structures, SQLServer 2008 is now sporting a new Data type called HeirarchyId. This will make our job so much easier, phew

To my earlier “Long way from Panorama” post, I wanted to add that Microsoft has now climbed to top position in the “Ability to Execute” Axis only.

To reach the overall top position in the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Grid, Microsoft needs to now further address its strategies for “Completeness of Vision”. One of the big strategic move to address this vision was acquiring Strature (An MDM Product) mid last year. 

Ever since I had an opportunity to design & build a enterprise core Master Data Management application for a big Telecom Company in Australia, I have been quite keen in keeping up to date on MDM Technologies.   

Microsoft’s approach to MDM further tightens the integration of their BI, SharePoint, and Dynamics platforms by offering a web interface (driven by SharePoint) to data management (driven by SQL Server) that integrates easily with new or existing Enterprise Operational systems. 

Microsoft’s MDM Road-map can be found here.