Data Warehouse: Essential or Optional for BI?

A business or an enterprise runs it operations on a continuous feed of information that comes from various sources, platforms, and systems. Collectively such sources make up the components for enterprise data.

The business takes decisions based on such information usually in the form of reports and/or dashboards from time to time. It is important to secure this flow of information. The information from enterprise data sources needs to be trustworthy, relevant, accurate and accessible. In a business of any scale there are various forms/sources/system that generate data from which reports are created for decision making.

Reports used by the business users for decision making are critical to the business and have a long life – typically for as long as the need remains e.g., consider the following reports used by various departments in a business:

If we consider an organization manufacturing and selling goods, various departments will typically need a lot of reports at different times with varied levels of details. Most such reports are derived from transactional data residing in various systems. (see an example below) :

Exhibit 1

In this case, data is derived directly from feeding independent systems and reports are provided to the organization, however,…