ResiliEnt believes the goal for any Data Strategy is to make information available across the enterprise to help drive your business more effectively and more efficiently! Data Driven Organizations are more agile, more competitive, experience business improvement and have a clearer view of their business at any given time.
An effective Data Warehouse Strategy (DW) is the horsepower running your BI strategy. We know that an organization’s data is a major asset, and the importance of data quality. However, we sometimes overlook the basic need to have an overall strategy for managing our data assets, a data strategy that encompasses more than data quality.
Over time, many companies find themselves operating disparate business intelligence systems making it difficult to share and aggregate key performance indicators (KPI’s). A well-defined DW strategy turns data into actionable information in order to achieve goals that include improving the decision-making process, identifying new opportunities, and recognizing issues and problems in time to take corrective action.
A data warehouse is a consolidated view of your enterprise data, optimized for reporting and analysis. Basically it’s an aggregated, sometimes summarized copy of transaction and non-transaction data specifically structured for dynamic queries and analytics. In data warehousing, data and information are extracted from heterogeneous production data sources as they are generated, or in periodic stages, making it simpler and more efficient to run queries over data that originally came from different sources.
Bottom Line Benefits:
- More informed decision making; reviewing various types of data allows you to track past and current trends, while predicting future trends and issue – resulting in meaningful business intelligence reports
- Transparency across all business units
- Reduce total cost of ownership based on adapted business intelligence systems, or group tools (portals, database, or extract transform load processes)
- Increase business units’ productivity and potential profitability by focusing on adding value and improving operations
- Align business intelligence with enterprise strategic goals and growth
The ResiliEnt approach would be to initially identify and assess your business priorities and primary pain points when it comes to data (pain can arise due to the inability to satisfy and address both current and future business requirements due to lack of capability). Effective data warehousing can also eliminate archaic data storage systems that have long outlived any useful purpose or free up other devices that are too stocked with data to perform additional functions. At all stages of maturity, this effort requires and benefits from a collaborative investigation/effort among key stakeholders including business, IT and operations.
What to consider when defining the correct DW Strategy:
- Data is the lifeblood of your organization and treat it accordingly. Even with the newest advances in technology, the old adage “garbage in, garbage out” is still relevant!
- What data do we need to run/analyze our organization and how long do we need it?
- In the design of any operational or analytic application, this is the one of the most important concerns- data is more important than process.
- If you have the right data, you can always find a way to process it; if you are missing critical data, then processes that depend on it will be compromised or simply not work at all.
- Contrary to what some companies may still believe, effective data warehouse solutions do not have to be costly. Nor do they have to be complex or limited to a single size and scope.