Data warehousing, performance management and business intelligence (BI) are top priorities for enterprise CIOs looking to improve business operations, access timely data and meet compliance regulations. This month's Executive Guide offers CIOs information and advice on the various tools and strategies necessary to implement and manage a data warehouse in the enterprise.
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This guide is designed to give IT leaders strategic guidance and advice that addresses the management and decision-making aspects of timely topics.
Data warehouse disaster recovery: What's the plan? 数据挖掘研究院
It used to be that when you had a data warehouse, an analyst would run a bunch of queries against an offline copy of two years' worth of data, analyse it, and if disaster struck the data warehouse, it would simply be repopulated on a new system. 数据挖掘研究院
Not anymore. With data warehousing and BI increasingly tied to mission-critical applications, it's not always certain that a disaster recovery (DR) plan accounts for your data warehouse. 数据挖掘实验室
"Data warehousing and business intelligence did start out as being not mission critical," said Claudia Imhoff, president and founder of Intelligent Solutions, a consultancy in Boulder, Colo. "People would extract data out of the operational system and run away into their own environment, completely separated from operations. But in the past 10 years, analytics have become quite critical." 数据挖掘研究院
Imhoff said businesses today directly tie data warehouses to key applications, such as stock price analysis, fraud detection and inventory planning. Not only are companies more dependent on BI, but the systems are also serving new, less technology-savvy audiences than when BI was used largely by analysts, Imhoff said. "If something goes wrong, they don't know how to fix it, and it really does cripple them in terms of making good business decisions." 数据挖掘交友
Gartner data warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant 2007
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Gartner's 2007 data warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant found that the market is returning to tried-and-true IT mantras. 数据挖掘研究院
This year is notably different from a few years ago, when the data warehousing market was experiencing an unusual trend for the IT industry, according to Mark Beyer, research director with the Stamford, Conn.-based analyst firm and co-author of the study. Companies were willing to spend significant money, time and effort on data warehousing in order to achieve ideal implementations, Beyer said. This year, he found that companies are going back to IT basics, wanting to "do better with less." That is, they want to spend less money and time but achieve better results. 数据挖掘研究院
That's due in part to a maturing market, he explained. Data warehousing has been around for about 18 years now, and customers expect that software vendors have successfully and cost-effectively solved problems with data warehouse physics, mixed workloads and hardware platforms -- issues Beyer discussed in last year's study. There's another reason customers are less forgiving than in years past. 数据挖掘交友
BI projects fail without C-level ownership
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When BI software projects fail, IT is often blamed. But the failure can usually be traced to lack of leadership, not technology.
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In fact, a new survey finds that a lack of ownership by the right executive often leads to a disconnect between the vision of senior management and the way a project gets done.
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"The core issue with business intelligence [not succeeding] isn't a technical issue," said Betsy Burton, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. Rather, she said, it's the failure on the part of business leaders to make sure the organisation gets the information it needs and leverages it in a way that makes sense with the business objectives.
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"It's interesting," Burton said. "The symptom that people see is a lack of vision, a lack of strategy, a lack of linking supportive business intelligence back to systems. It's very easy for managers to say, 'Hey the data is wrong,' rather than take an introspective look. They should ask 'Have I given the organisation a clear sense of what we're trying to get out of business intelligence? Am I really arming my people within my organisation with a sense of the importance and the metrics so that they can deliver valuable information?' It's easier to point at the numbers and say, 'The numbers are wrong. Fix them.'"
