Why does it take me so long to get data at work?
Think of the following situation. You have a meeting tomorrow morning with your
management team in which you would like to tell them that you think the company should invest in a sales team within London, a market you currently don’t have a local presence in. Your hypothesis is that you have seen a rise in sales in that area and you want to capitalise on the momentum. You would like to put together a report to back you up, but realise that to get this report would require you to go on a long list of similar request to which you would get your static report back. Of course, you skip this process and enter your meeting with no data. You are not a data driven business. In fact, even with the report, you are a data aided business, but without forecasting, simulation and other factors, you are very far away from being able to back your hypothesis with anything tangible.
Like most enterprise companies today, you are in the same state as the story mentions above. Why is this happening? Because what would typically be solved with the Data Warehouse, is not addressing the requirements of the modern business. The Data Warehouse is still a critical piece of the overall story, but it is not purpose built to solve certain demands of todays enterprise companies.
When we ask our enterprise customers what the forefront of business needs, it is
echoed loud and clear that data needs to be un-siloed, data needs to be flexible, high quality, much more ready to use than it is today. This requires new ways of thinking, new technology and a new drive from the C level to initiate this program. The forefront of business needs to be able to explore what data is available as a start. They need to know what is available for them to “play” with - otherwise it is just guess work. This starts with some type of public catalog, but not a catalog in the way that the enterprise is use to. We are talking about a catalog which is much more about searching for business objects, instead of tables, columns and un blended data sources. This is too raw, it is too technical, it is not ready in any meaning of the word.
