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Warehousing renaissance E-business and the focus on customers
are boosting interest in data warehousing and business intelligence, Pat
Sweet finds. |
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Recent developments in the world of data warehousing and business intelligence read like something out of an old-fashioned fairy tale – the sort where a slumbering maiden is awakened from a hundred years’ sleep by a kiss from the future king. Whether this story will have an entirely happy ending remains to be seen. Data warehousing and business intelligence technologies have been around for a while. Ever since the mid-1980s, organisations have been collecting corporate data into large repositories and attempting to perform some kind of analysis on it using a variety of tools. By the end of the last century, most big companies had a data warehouse implementation somewhere in the company – but not necessarily very much to show from all that investment. Among the biggest fans of the technology were the high street supermarket chains, which famously built huge data warehouses to hold all the details they gathered from customer loyalty schemes. But at least one major player pulled the plug on its version of this project on grounds that some suppliers might regard as humbling: the retailer said it was so expensive and difficult to analyse customer data in order to devise targeted offerings that it was cheaper simply to cut prices across the board in the hope that everyone would benefit. |
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International Consultants' Guide May 2001
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Data
Warehousing & Business Intelligence