A Business Intelligence tool will always be more effective with a powerful Data Warehouse. To be able to query, analyse and generate worthwhile reports, BI systems should have all relevant available information to hand. Unfortunately information relating to transactions such as sales data, human resources data etc. are normally stored in different applications within the company, and physically held in different databases.

This makes it very difficult to generate the type of intelligent information and level of reports expected today by management today want to analyse data and relationships across the whole company. Having the data coming from many different sources to one location, a data warehouse has become crucial for the success of the Business Intelligence initiative. From a business viewpoint the investment, spread over a few years, will turn into a high ROI.

Investment costs for a Data Warehouse may look quite high in the short term, but it is important to look at it as a long term investment. It will reduce future development costs as any requested report or view can be easily facilitated.

When considering implementing a Data Warehouse it should not be regarded as solely a computerisation process for a solitary part of the company. It should be seen as a new strategy for the whole company.

Therefore management should build up a strategy for the company and identify the information they require in each business direction. Business Analysts need to analyse the organizational data sources so they can build up the most effective Data Warehouse which would help the new process.

At the heart of the data warehousing process is the ETL (extract, transform, and load) process. Implementation of this process is not just an IT concern but the business as a whole should be involved in ensuring that it is able to satisfy the business requirements. The ETL process is responsible for connecting to and extracting data from one or more sources, transforming it according to defined business rules and loading it into the data model. It is here where data quality achieved.

There are so many advantages of using this kind of system. Information concerning customer scores, future campaigns and new product lines can all be gleaned from the analysis that will be available. This will result in high customer retention and the creation of unique products. Information will be available to all managers across the company thereby stropping middle-managers effectively building their own mini empires at the expense of other departments. These collaborative reports will increase the efficiency and accuracy of the company and the return on human investment will increase greatly.

About the Author:
Mike has more than 15 years of experience designing and implementing data warehouses based on Oracle, MS SQL Server, MySql, PostgreSQL and more.
He is currently working for DB Software Laboratory.

Mike Rewnick

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