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More than 80% of advertising is ignored. More than 50% of Data Warehouse projects fail in one way or another. The information explosion has been accompanied by a massive increase in the ranks of the willfully stupid.

  1. The term is “Data Warehousing”. Data Warehousing does all the heavy lifting which Business Intelligence selection, analysis and visual presentation tools can then exploit.
  2. Data Warehousing is strategic, tactical and exploratory, all other information supply is either operational or superfluous, and should be provided by your operational systems and 3rd party providers, such as the big ERP vendors (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and etcetera).
  3. Data Warehousing is fundamentally about business process and should be solely driven by business imperatives. Without business imperatives there is no reason for the existence of a Data Warehouse.
  4. To understand Data Warehousing you must be also capable of understanding business process.
  5. An adequate understanding of business process is not typically taught in classes on ETL, UNIX, RDBMS or Middleware, etcetera.
  6. The four key defining features of Data Warehousing were first documented by Bill Inmon[1], and should be the first criteria to be tested in each and every iteration of a Data Warehouse.
  7. Ralph Kimball is the most visible and successful advocate of the very useful ‘star schema’ dimensional model.
  8. Data Warehousing is about improvement through business driven innovation and creative use.[2] Data Warehousing isn’t about “expanding the menu”.
  9. A data warehouse business process must be continually subjected to testing, including risk and requirements based testing.
  10. Data Warehousing is part of an organization’s intellectual capital, and must be handled as the asset that it is. For example, although many businesses do this, the outsourcing and especially offshoring of your intellectual capital processes, initiatives and projects is always abject folly.

So, thanks for reading and until next time. Ciao!

[1] Subject oriented; integrated; time variant; and, non-volatile.

[2] “Innovation’ isn’t what innovators do….it’s what customers and clients adopt.” – Michael Schrage

File under: Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Richard Jones, Martyn Jones, Cambriano Energy, Iniciativa Consulting, Iniciativa para Data Warehouse, Tiki Taka Pro