BecomingWhoYouWantToBe

The need for data warehousing solution has been increasing for the past few years. Many companies, medium and larged size, have become aware of the importance of data warehouse. Data warehouse has grown significantly for the past few years, from just theorized knowledge and research studies in universities to becoming one of the most critical components for companies’ business intelligence.

Many industries has experienced a revolution in the way theyperform business analysis and make strategic decisions. This industries include utility business, airline companies, government departments, manufacturing enterprises, financial institutions and retail chain stores.

In the early 90s, in order to keep up with the global competition and complex business growth, business executives became desperate for information to stay competitive and improve the bottom line. Although operational systems provided daily operational informations, they weren’t what the executives needed. The executives needed different kinds of information that could be readily used to make strategic decisions. They wanted to know where to build the next warehouse, which product lines to expand, and which markets they should strengthen. Therefore, businesses were compelled to turn to new ways of getting strategic information.

Over the past two decades, companies have accumulated tons and tons of data about their operations. Mountains of data exist. Information is said to double every 18 months. If we have such huge quantities of data in our organizations, why cant our executives and managers use this data for making strategic decisions? Lots and lots of information exist. Why then do we talk about an information crisis? Most companies are faced with an information crisis not because of lack of sufficient data, but because the available data is not readily usable for strategic decision making. These large quantities of data are very useful and good for running the business operations, but hardly amenable for use in making decisions about business strategies and objectives.

The fact is that for nearly two decades or more, IT departments have been attempting to provide information to key personnel in their companies for making strategic decisions. Sometimes an IT department could produce ad hoc reports from a single application. In most cases, the reports would need data from multiple systems, requiring the writing of extract programs to create intermediary files that could be used to produce the ad hoc reports. Most of these attempts by IT in the past ended in failure. The users could not clearly define what they wanted in the first place. Once they saw the first set of reports, they wanted more data in different formats. The chain continued. This was mainly because of the very nature of the process of making strategic decisions. Information needed for strategic decision making has to be available in an interactive manner. The user must be able to query online, get results, and query some more. The information must be in a format suitable for analysis.

What is a basic reason for the failure of all the previous attempts by IT to provide strategic information? What has IT been doing all along? The fundamental reason for the inability to provide strategic information is that we have been trying all along to provide strategic information from the operational systems. These operational systems such as order processing, inventory control, claims processing, outpatient billing, and so on are not designed or intended to provide strategic information. If we need the ability to provide strategic information, we must get the information from altogether different types of systems. Only specially designed decision support systems or informational systems can provide strategic information.

At this stage of our discussion, we now realize that we do need different types of decision support systems to provide strategic information. The type of information needed for strategic decision making is different from that available from operational systems. We need a new type of system environment for the purpose of providing strategic information for analysis, discerning trends, and monitoring performance.

This new system environment that users desperately need to obtain strategic information happens to be the new paradigm of data warehousing. Enterprises that are building data warehouses are actually building this new system environment. This new environment is kept separate from the system environment supporting the day-to-day operations. The data warehouse essentially holds the business intelligence for the enterprise to enable strategic decision making. The data warehouse is the only viable solution. We have clearly seen that solutions based on the data extracted from operational systems are all totally unsatisfactory. Basically, data warehouse is a simple concept, it involves different functions: data extraction, the function of loading the data, transforming the data, storing the data, and providing user interfaces.

The end result is the creation of a new computing environment for the purpose of providing the strategic information every enterprise needs desperately. There are several vendor tools available in each of these technologies. You do not have to build your data warehouse from scratch.