How can companies ensure that their data warehouse delivers as promised?
More and more companies are integrating their data with those of supply-chain partners, acquired divisions or vendors to whom they’ve outsourced their IT function. This melding of data promises enticing advantages, such as real-time updating of customer information, the opportunity to focus on core capabilities and instant forecasting of inventory needs to suppliers. With such advantages, companies look forward to sending new products and services to market faster than ever, providing better customer service and slashing production and inventory costs.
But too many firms fail to realize these benefits. For some, the data warehouse created to combine data from multiple sources has a user interface that is hard to navigate or contains program code that is difficult to maintain. For others, data generated by the system turn out to be inaccurate or irrelevant to users’ needs or are delivered too late to prove useful. And for organizations that outsource their data warehousing, misunderstandings between IT customers and vendors about expected service levels can crop up once the system is implemented.