Leveraging Business Process Models for ETL Design

As Business Intelligence evolves from off-line strategic decision making to on-line operational decision making, the design of the back-end Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes is becoming even more complex. Many challenges arise in this new context like their optimization and modeling. In this paper, we focus on the disconnection between the IT-level view of the enterprise presented by ETL processes and the business view of the enterprise required by managers and analysts. We propose the use of business process models for a conceptual view of ETL. We show how to link this conceptual view to existing business processes and how to translate from this conceptual view to a logical ETL view that can be optimized. Thus, we link the ETL processes back to their underlying business processes and so enable not only a business view of the ETL, but also a near real-time view of the entire enterprise.