Assessing the Maturity of Your Data Warehouse

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

A data warehouse evolves continually throughout time. It is not like a transactional application which serves one purpose like point of sale or general ledger and that's it. You always continue to find new purposes for your data warehouse, whether that involves additional data to enrich your analyses, adding applications to utilize information in a data warehouse for business workflowbor new tools to perform advanced statistical analysis.

You are always re-inventing your data warehouse. It is a good thing that warehouses are so strategically valuable to organizations. Knowledge is power and warehouses provide knowledge; thus organizations who master business intelligence will gain a competitive edge. The tendency, however, is to keep building and keep extending the data warehouse. Most organizations don't stop and really assess how well the warehouse will support the purposes it is being targeted for. It is extremely important that all warehouses perform a yearly assessment to analyze the maturity of your data warehouse.

The data warehouse assessment should focus around four key areas: business sponsorship, program management/change management, architecture and costs. Assessing these key areas will enable you to make improvements to keep your warehouse healthy in meeting business needs.

Business Sponsorship

Strong business sponsorship …

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