Just give me the numbers!
We hear this cry on a regular basis. The executive doesn’t want a data
warehouse. He/She wants some key numbers in an accurate, timely manner. There
is, quite rightly, a deep suspicion of any initiative to put a data warehouse
in place – the data warehouse can be seen as large, expensive and unwieldy.
However we know from experience that any solution that just provides
the numbers will require enhancements by day two. So it is important that
providing these key numbers doesn’t become a dead-end solution. Ways to avoid
this include:
-
setting up a separate ‘database’ for the initial solution
-
extracting more data from the source systems than is required but not
processing it. This enables rapid additions to reporting without the need to go
back to a separately controlled and managed application
-
providing key users with the ability to perform their own ad hoc queries/
reports in a cheap fashion.
Read next »
