In order to get started in business intelligence, the first technical step an organization needs to take is to acquisition and centralize this data. The acquisition process requires that an organization export data from their sources and centralize it in the staging schema of their data warehouse. The means to accomplish this task has two main solutions. An organization can either build these acquisition processes in-house from scratch, or they can leverage a pre-built tool in order to automate the process. These two options have their trade-offs and the final solution may be a combination of both approaches.

Building your data acquisition process in-house can be a tall task depending on the source data. The main considerations when building data acquisition from scratch are the technical capabilities of your people, the time you are willing to spend on the solution, the complexity of the solution, and the tools and infrastructure you have available. If you have people within your organization who can build the solution for cheaper than you can buy, then it may make sense to have this done in-house.

Other times organizations find it easier to leverage one of the many pre-built open-source or closed-source options available to help automate the data acquisition process. When choosing a third-party option, a major consideration is compatibility between the tool, your source data, and your data warehouse. Other considerations are price, ease of implementation, level of online support, and scalability.

Here at ConradBI our consultants will handle the intricacies of selecting between using in-house or pre-built acquisition tooling. We start with our own toolset and if more is needed, we select the best approach based on your organization’s needs. Our own development team can handle any in-house coding required to acquisition your unique data. We manage the whole acquisition approach so you can spend your time where it counts, analysis.