Enterprise Data Warehouse Challenges

Yet, despite the promise of increased business efficiencies and greater overall profitability, many companies find that the buy-in process for an EDW can be an overwhelming challenge. There are a number of reasons for this reality, yet in the end, they all tend to fall into one of two categories:

1. An inability or unwillingness by specific personnel or departments to recognize how the EDW will specifically benefit them.
2. An inability on the part of the decision-makers to grasp the true ROI of the EDW.

Defining the EDW

Before examining in greater depth the reasons why it can be so difficult to rally universal approval for an EDW, it is necessary to define the term.

As mentioned, a true EDW is a single version of the organization’s business data. Given the variety of IT systems and repositories of data that reside in most business organizations, particularly larger ones, creating such an entity can be daunting. Still, unless it consolidates all data elements into one cohesive entity, it cannot truly be labeled an EDW.

The EDW must incorporate many departmental disciplines, including but not limited to accounting, sales, R&D, human resources, etc. It should be flexible enough to incorporate new disciplines in the future as necessary.

While single-subject data marts have traditionally been built using denormalized models as their underlying architecture, EDWs tend to utilize a more normalized model. User friendliness and orientation should be key priorities for the proper construction of the EDW in order to encourage widespread use of the system as well as allow users to operate solely at the business level; that is, no one should have to be overly technologically savvy to share in the system’s benefits.

The Challenges - and Overcoming Them

With this definition as a backdrop, it is easier to comprehend the challenges required to gain approval for the EDW concept. These challenges are not insurmountable, as long as they are correctly and quickly identified.

One of the primary questions is, what does each group within an organization require to ensure their initial and ultimate acceptance of the EDW project? Often, unless an organization takes the initiative to develop a center of excellence (CoE) - an internal group that provides consulting services and oversight to the various data warehousing development groups within an organization - the company just flails around trying to make the project work.

For the end-user community, approval is a byproduct of knowing that they will have access to a tool that is extremely intuitive and that does not require them to learn a “foreign” language. For the IT support staff, it is being clear on the exact nature of their domain responsibilities, as IT is increasingly becoming the gatekeeper of a company’s information infrastructure. For executive leadership, it is having the confidence that they are going to be able to get the trusted information they need to make intelligent business decisions as well as understand the specific system ROI - if not in actual dollars, at least in strategic and productivity improvement. Compliance officers have to be assured that the system will operate in accordance with all of the appropriate rules and regulations of their industry.

Ultimately, everyone has their own agendas and priorities when it comes to the EDW project. What must happen is that all of these agendas and priorities must align seamlessly with the overarching strategic goals of the organization. Once this occurs, the clarity of the buy-in can begin to take shape, with each person realizing that he is just one cog - albeit an important cog - in the overall machinery.

Who Sets the Goals?

This begs the question: where do these overarching goals originate? When you’re talking about a medium-sized or large enterprise, these goals are primarily established by the organization’s executive leadership team. Typical high-level strategic objectives include cutting service response time by 20 percent; adopting a just-in-time operating policy where no more than seven day’s worth of supplies are kept on hand; growing a certain percent per year for the next five years with a hybrid organic/inorganic strategy; opening up new markets; or increasing net profits by x number of dollars.

Once these objectives are clearly and succinctly laid out by management and filtered down to the individual departments, the best scenario is that each department not only embraces them but immediately sees the obstacles to achieving them with the company’s current technological resources. The ideal response would be, “Gee, I’d love to increase customer service, but we have one database here, another one over there and a manual process here, so there’s just no way our current systems can help us meet this goal.” Consequently, the introduction of an EDW that can help knock down these obstacles would ostensibly be a welcome addition.

Fear of Technology and Change

Sadly, personnel from different departments often harbor certain fears about new technology as well as being generally defiant about embracing change. Take IT, for example. Perhaps they simply don’t buy in to the project right from the beginning. The support staff thinks, “We don’t really need this, and it will just be more work for us. Things are fine the way they are.”