Thread: "Golden Rules for converting Data to Decision"

I recently read a blog which spoke about the “5 Golden Rules for converting Data to Decision”. What are your “Golden Rules” for converting Data to Decision?

For those interested in reading the original blog, here's a link:

Five golden rules for converting data to decisions | BI Blog | Business Intelligence (BI) Blog

After reading the article, I began to reflect on my own experience, to which I only had one simple rule: get to the single source of the truth. I know it sounds cliche and is often a daunting task, especially in a new implementation, but if you can get the business to buy-in and get past their personal Excel spreadsheets or Access databases, providing a window to that single source of the truth through your data warehouse will do more for converting data into decisions than any number of other efforts combined.

data doesn't mean anything if it is only data.
You need group some data base on your requirement. For example:
You want to know when and where the average sales increase significantly
so you need to assume what data you required. Let say you will need data of:
1. list of city
2. Sales date
3. Qty
4. Sales Name
you have to combine all that data to generate information.
So in general to me the step are:
1. Define your information needed/requirement
2. List data needed to generate accurate information
3. Define relationship between all data
4. Combine all data/process the data to generate information required
5. Analyze the result which is the information to make decision