Page 83 - DCAP208_Management Support Systems

Management Support Systems

Notes Benefits of Data Warehouses

The core benefits include:
Historical information for comparative and competitive analysis
Enhanced data quality and completeness

Supplementing disaster recovery plans with another data back up source.
Among the greatest benefits of a data warehouse is the ability to analyze and execute business
decisions based on data from multiple sources.

Example: An organization has collected valuable data and stored it in 30 databases.
A data warehouse is not only a convenient way to analyze and compare data in all the databases,
but it can also give historical data and perspective. Thus data warehouse is a one-stop shop, but
it is also a one-stop shop from an historical perspective as well. Using data warehouse, one can
look at past trends, whether they be product sales or customers or whatever and may be do some
predictions of what is going to happen in the future.

Also data retrieved from multiple databases is not constrained by the tables in each of those
databases. A data warehouse receives application neutral data. Whatever database application is
supplying the information to the data warehouse is not preconditioning the data to be presented
in a way the originator of the data requires. That means, the data from the inventory system, the
financial system, or the sales system is sent to the data warehouse for processing as application
neutral data that is not formatted to answer only queries from an inventory database, finance
database, or sales database program. If not for application-neutral data, the data warehouse
would be nothing more than a collection of data marts.
A data warehouse by itself does not create value, but value comes from the use of the data in the
warehouse. In support of a low cost strategy, the data warehouse can provide savings in billing
processes, reduce fraud losses, and reduce the cost of reporting. The data warehouses can provide
analysts with precalculated reports and graphs. This increases the productivity of business
analysts.
Most companies can benefit from a data warehouse when the proper tools are in place and users
are trained in analysis of results.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. The ........................ is that portion of an overall Architected Data Environment that serves
as the single integrated source of data for processing information.
2. Any data store that is designed primarily to receive data into a warehousing environment
is called ........................
3. ........................ is a means of aggregating data based on a set of known dimensions.

6.2 Process Overview

Organizations continuously collect data, information, and knowledge at an increasingly
accelerated rate and store them in computerized systems. The number of users needing to access
the information continues to increase as a result of improved reliability and availability of
network access, especially the Internet.

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