Better Business Intelligence (BI) can keep a business alive during this global financial crisis. But BI has always come at a high cost. How is the Data Warehousing industry providing cheaper visibility, so that management can make better decisions?
It started with a credit-crunch but turned into a global financial crisis. Now businesses are clamoring over their data to understand how they can compete. Business Intelligence (BI) can be the last-ditch defence against a tough climate – understanding its data may be the only way left for a business to survive.
Traditional BI methods don’t come cheap. While CEOs know they need better information, they also know from their tech teams how expensive it is to build a Data Warehouse. To pull data together from many different sources and to integrate that data into a repository for reporting, the budgets are typically eye-watering.
We are in the perfect storm of two very powerful interests colliding in the boardroom. Firstly, management demands better Business Intelligence to stay competitive, while at the same time, CIOs are forced to deliver on tighter budgets.
The landscape is shifting due to stormy economic, legal, technological, and even social forces. The waves of this storm reach high enough to overturn a great many unsuspecting organizations that lapse in their vigilance. History shows that times of challenge are the triggers for adopting new ways, and that during those testing times, only those who act swiftly can remain afloat.
In the Business Intelligence industry, real changes are happening. Gertjan Vlug, CEO of BIReady, a vendor of Data Warehousing Automation tools remarks on the shift in focus from the old and expensive ways, to the new Data Warehouse Management System (DWMS) approach. “This has been happening for a while now. We all know how difficult it is to adapt an OLAP report when that data was sourced by hand, transformed and loaded by hand, warehoused into a normalized repository by hand, and fed into star-schema Data Marts by hand-crafted processes. The new way is Automation. It doesn’t simplify the process; it just takes care of the complexity under a well-managed layer of automation.”
We all know that automation smashes costs; Ford showed us that principle a century ago. But to what extent can Data Warehousing, with all its complexity be truly benefited by automation. “Well the ETL is generated by the tool. “, Vlug explains, “Proper history is taken care of, and so are the Data Warehouse keys. The tool builds the Data Warehouse – a proper Inmon implementation in just a few minutes. Using a Wizard, genuine Kimball Data Marts for OLAP and other reports can be generated and fully managed.”
Vendors such as BIReady have uncovered huge advantage for organizations that need faster BI. Vlug gets to the heart of the issue by revealing how the Data Model is the driving force behind the solution. “You build your whole BI solution by modelling your business in a tool like CA’s ERwin, for example. Then, using that Business Information Model, you can either construct your Data Warehouse by hand, or you can use BIReady to import build the whole thing for you. But that’s just the beginning. Change your Data Model and BIReady reconfigures the solution on the fly. It used to take weeks, sometimes months to adapt a report. Now it can happen while the client makes coffee.”
Does automation solve the issue? The Data Warehouse Management System provides automation for building and maintaining a Data Warehouse, and the effect is that results can be delivered to the business in a fraction of the cost and at great speed.
This is the climate for more business Intelligence delivered from cheaper Data Warehousing. But even more important than lower build costs, as veteran BI-driven organizations have discovered, is the cost of adapting and growing a solution. For this, the Model-driven DWMS is the industry’s answer to the perfect problem.