Measure factory

A system for managing a business operation through application of insight into the operation, comprising:

• a measure factory for generating analytical measures computed on operational business data that characterize the operation independently of the location of data, the measure factory comprising:
• a plurality of factory rules that govern which operations are executed on available operational business data based on one or more conditions in the measure factory, the executing of operations taking into account source rules that are associated with individual columns of a columnar array of the data and at least one of the plurality of factory rules;
• a factory rule execution hierarchy that specifies executing those factory rules that lack dependency on other factory rules before executing factory rules that have dependency on other factory rules;
• and
• a factory rules processing facility adapted to apply a portion of the factory rules to available data in a portion of the plurality of data sets based on the factory rule execution hierarchy;
• wherein at least one reference to data in an analytical measure maps to at least one of a type of the operational business data and a rule governing the operational business data that characterize the operation.