Goals of data warehouse

May 10, 2011

Goals of data warehouse       

            Data warehouse is a process of extracting the useful data out of massive database which is very helpful for the top level management to make decisions and get the required information for the further analysis of the business process. It looks at organization's data from the bird's eye view and gives us the clear picture of the overall organization.

            The data warehouse should present the organization's information clearly, without misleading the decision makers. For example, sales database would only look at the sales transaction of the customer and may conclude that the customer is loyal to the company but, the information about the same customer from the accounts database may show that the customer we thought loyal, actually was late on payments and is a burden for our business. Hence, the overall data, combining all the departments is very crucial and important for a business to be successful. Therefore, we need to have organization's data presented clearly to the top level management for correct decision making.  

            We need to make sure that an organization's data and information are easily accessible to the users (Kimball, Page 3). The tools that we use should be easy enough for our staffs to learn or use it. We also need to make sure that the reports we generate out of the data warehouse is not complex for the managerial staff to understand. We need to hide the complexity and show the report in simple form. This makes the information accessed easily, and we can except good decision making for the profitability of our business.

            Business process is changing and every day we have more advanced technology being introduced into the market. We can't stop the advancement in technology and the change in business process. Rather, what we can adapt is, we can make data warehouse adapt to the future change in technology and also the business processes. For example, if our business operates individually only in one location but has a mighty probability that it would expand its location in future then we must make data warehouse adaptable for many branches to operate. This would save time and money for our business, even though,  return on investment at that particular time seems to go against it.

            Once of the most important aspect of data warehousing is security. It contains reports and analysis of the overall business and this information is very sensitive. If it reaches our competitor's hand then they could use it against our business. Hence, we need to make sure there are no loop holes in our system for the hackers to enter and compromise our information.

            The main purpose of data warehouse is to provide decision making ability to the management. Therefore, it must serve as the application for the managerial staff to make decisions based on the facts given by the data warehouse. For example, the manager for sales department of a video store is confused about if he wants to introduce a sale for the videos older than four months. He should get the facts from data warehouse if it is either beneficial or not to introduce a sale. Hence, they should help make decisions that should eventually yield profit for the business.

            It doesn't matter if we build a very good data warehouse system which is very efficient, unless the users that use the warehouse accept it (Kimball, Page 4). It is very important because if they avoid using it then the data warehouse would not be able to give the results it should have given. This means that we need to build a data warehouse that would be accepted by the users using it. Therefore, in the process of making data warehouse requirement, we need to see the technical knowledge of the users of the data warehouse and make it suitable for the users to use it.

            The most important goal of building a data warehouse is to make the business owners happy.

            How can we make our business owners happy?

            The answer is not with our words but with our works, by building an efficient system that would analyze the overall data of our business which is free of problems and can be trusted. We need to constantly develop and maintain the data warehouse so that they can make important decisions based on the facts shown.

            Basically, in today's information economy, the most important goal of data warehouse is to analyze all the data in all of the database of our business and come up with a overall view of our business organization to dump some of the unnecessary information and look at the overall aspect of the organization to make better decision for better business management.

Works Cited:

Kimball, Ralph, and Margy Ross. The Data Warehouse Toolkit: the Complete Guide to      Dimensional Modeling. New York: Wiley, 2002. Print.