Access to Critical Business Intelligence: Challenging Data Warehouses?
Olin Thompson & P.J. Jakovljevic - July 15, 2005

Direct Access Rather Than a DW for Mid-Market?

For a long time, data warehousing used to be synonymous with business intelligence (BI), to the extent that there is a deep ingrained belief that BI cannot be conducted without a data warehouse (DW). Indeed, when companies are dealing with a deluge of data, it helps to have a DW, since it offers large corporations the ability to leverage information assets to support enterprise reporting and analysis. DWs also provide a technical solution to the problem of multiple systems, separate data stores, and rapidly expanding historical data, since information is extracted from various transaction-based systems, such as spreadsheet, enterprise resource planning ( ERP), supply chain management (SCM), or customer resource management (CRM) systems, and stored in a central repository where it is transformed, cleaned, and consolidated...