Why should I use a Data Warehouse?

Why should I use a Data Warehouse?

There are hundreds of reasons why a data warehouse is useful to your organization, I would suggest the following list be a good starting point: (If you have these needs you may need a true back-end enterprise scalable historical data store : or Enterprise Data Warehouse)….

ü  Real-time issues – your current systems aren’t enabled to integrate disparate sources of data and keep historical records of those integrations, in near real-time.

ü  Scalability issues – you have tons of historical data you need to gather in to an easily accessible place, common formats, common keys, and common access methods. AND you need to ensure that the system is scalable over the next 3 to 5 years.

ü  Avoidance of Siloed Solution Sets – if you have many different or disparate solutions already in existence, yet your corporation is unable to answer common questions requiring consistency across your enterprise.

ü  Enterprise Class System of Record – across historical and integrated data sets, if you have a need to do this, you probably need an enterprise data warehouse

ü  Disparate Source Systems along with Internal and External Data Sets – if you need to ingrate all of these for a single enterprise vision WITH HISTORY, then you need a data warehouse.

ü  Self-Service BI – if you have a need to eventually reach this goal, where users can “visualize” and construct their own reports, then you probably need an enterprise data warehouse, along with it’s highly integrated historical facts from all the different sources in your organization.

ü  Kick start for a Master Data Management initiative. If you want Master Data, then it is important to understand the nature of your history – where the problems exist, how the data does and does not align with business perception, and basically where to “get” the golden copies of records you want to begin populating your MDM solution (remember: MDM is NOT just a tool, it’s people, process, governance, and so on).. Yes, you can build MDM solutions without a Data Warehouse, but how good is your confidence that the data you selected is truly “gold copy” if you don’t have historical evidence to back it up?

ü  If you do ANY sort of data mining, you need a data warehouse. Data Mining is becoming (or already is) the heart-and-soul of better decision making in BI. And of course, the mining engine is only as smart as the domain of information that you provide to it, along with the model that is designed. Statistics say: you can project for 1/2 as much time as you have history for. So: with 2 years, you can project (with some accuracy) only 1 year out. The same goes for Data Mining initiatives, AND the better interconnected the data set is (by Business Keys across the enterprise) the better your Data Mining confidence ratings will be.