The Roach Motel of Data Warehousing
I was recently talking with a colleague in the public sector. He was describing their data warehouse. It has been in production for few years.
The hardware is stable..
The software is stable ..
The network is stable ..
The data model is stable..
The data loads run nightly and are stable…
But… Nobody uses the data.
We referred to this as the roach motel of data warehousing. “Data checks in but it never checks out”.
Seems the group that designed the warehouse did an outstanding job of designing the Holy Grail of data models. It had everything a user would ever need. It was pulling from various sources and homogenizing the data. But the group forgot one thing. A data warehouse needs business intelligence and analytics to make it truly useful. The only thing the users did was create an extract and then bring the data into Excel for some fancy reporting.
Although this is an extreme situation, it is still somewhat common. It only further points out the need for integration of the various disciplines that make up EPM including BI, Performance Management, MDM, ETL, Data Quality, and Operational Reporting.