Data Warehouse Business Principles
While data warehousing is a promising technology, it can become problematic for companies that fail to use core principles. In addition to having a proper design, data warehouses must be properly maintained and implemented.
To do this successfully, there are a number of important principles that companies will want to follow. The first thing that a company will want to have is a consensus within organization. The organization should be guided through the process of setting up the data warehouse, and the employees and managers should be able to understand the purpose in using it. A failure to create a consensus within the organization is one of the key reason why many data warehouse projects fail.
The next business principle you will want to focus on is data integrity. It could be argued that this is one of the most important aspects of data warehousing, and of business intelligence in general. If a company wants to succeed with their data warehousing project, the data must have a high level of integrity. The process of data integrity begins when the data warehouse is constructed. It should be constructed in a way that reduces the chances of the data being duplicated or inconsistent. The data should also be highly integrated. Many companies will create a methodology for data integrity, and this is fine so long as it is done with the end result.
Another principle that companies will want to pay attention to is the efficiency of the implementation. When this is done properly, the costs involved with setting of the data warehouse will be much lower, and the needs of the company can be met early in the process. The design for the data warehouse should be simple to implement. The implementation is one of the most fundamental aspects of creating a data warehouse. Even if a company has a data warehouse that showcases an impressive design, the data warehouse project will become tedious if this design is not easy to comprehend. Most importantly, a project like this can become costly.
When a data warehouse is designed, it is important for a company to focus on simplicity. Everything should be done from a practical standpoint, and this will allow the company to stay within its budget while helping it achieve its needs. Another pivotal aspect of a successful data warehouse is the user friendliness. Countless data warehouse projects fail because the data warehouse is not use friendly, and workers and managers do not see the need of using it in place of their traditional systems. Many vendors focus too much on the technicalities of the data warehouse, and fail to take the end user into consideration.
The best way to make the data warehouse user friendly is to create a standard front end that is used throughout the company. This front end should be based around security and the roles of the users. At the very least, the system should have a minimum learning curve. While this will be difficult to achieve given the complexity of the data warehouse, it is generally best for it to be within the range of users of have the least technical skill. After user friendliness, another core data warehouse principle is operational efficiency. As the name suggests, this is the efficiency of the data warehouse itself.
The operational efficiency of a data warehouse is closely related to its implementation. Once the data warehouse has been implemented, it should be much easier to support. Any business request that are made should easily be taken care of, and errors shouldn’t be of major concern.
The implementation of a data warehouse plays an important role in its operational efficiency, because if the implementation is done correctly in the early stages, the operational efficiency of the data warehouse will be much more efficient over the long term. There are certain IT principles that a company will also want to consider, and the most important is scalability.
Many companies run into problems when they try to add scalability to the design of their data warehouses. The best way to deal with the scalability issue is to build it into the system from the very beginning. This will alleviate any problems that may be caused by design inconsistencies.
