Is Building a Data Warehouse
the Right Solution for Your Business?

As your business is maturing and time comes to re-consider your information management strategy, how do you decide which system will meet your needs?

Let the following list help you decide if building a Data Warehouse is a solution for you.
 
Points in Support of custom Data Warehouse Development

1. Clear metadata:
   business-oriented labelling and hierarchical structure easy for everyone to understand
   Benefits: Any business
2. Cleaned data – critical because of numerous reasons of data quality degradation.
   Benefits:  Companies that
   - have data entered without sufficient quality control (especially spreadsheets or old IT systems),
   - have various (incompatible) sources that need to be conformed to a single version
3. Self-service reporting and analytical opportunities created by trusted data and clear metadata definitions
   Benefits: Business required advanced data analysis
4. Unified data from several sources
   create holistic view on the company’s information and can lead to better processes coordination and overall business processes improvement
   Benefits: Business handling various sources of data incompatible with each other
5. Easy Security Policy allowing role-based information control
   Benefits: Companies looking for a simple single security policy
6. Fast (immediate) user query response
   Benefits: Companies experiencing limitations of large database systems that are not able to deliver data for complex analysis/reports in reasonable time
7. Advanced features for data analysis: actions, KPIs, unified formatting, named sets, time intelligence
   Benefits: Companies that are
   - strategy-focused,
   - looking for ways to save time on information analysis in ordered to react to market changes more rapidly
8. Simplified report development
   Benefits: Companies looking to minimize IT resources involved in report development
9. Corporate strategy execution control
   Benefits: Growing companies or doing reorganization (acquisition etc.), primarily not to save costs but to:
   1. Increase revenue
   2. Have greater control over business strategy execution
   3. Better customer needs understanding
10. Reuse of all-in-one Database + BI software
    Benefits: Companies already utilizing the same database software platform.
    By adding BI functionality they decrease the TOO (total cost of ownership)
11. Historic data availability
    Benefits: Companies interested in analysis of data over several years, while old transactional data may no longer be available for reports.

Like everything, building a Data Warehouse has its own pros and cons. We’ll discuss concerns next.

Related posts:

1. Virtual Data Warehouse for Global Information Sharing