It’s a digital age, so things like warehousing are defunct now, right? In fact: no.
Actually, despite technology leaps that enable real-time access to business intelligence (BI) tools and data virtualization, data integration and data warehousing remains a must – even with prolific cloud-based technology.
And getting data warehousing right requires thoughtful planning to ensure all business information is clean, comprehensive, consistent, current, and conformed. The information housed in a business’s data warehouse comes from multiple internal applications, including marketing, sales, external partner systems, finance, and customer applications. Data from all these enterprise apps and enterprise systems is then
The value and importance of data warehousing can be easy to overlook since it’s the machine behind the scenes, supporting all the visible corporate data systems, called the BI, and not visible to business stakeholders or most employees overall. But the data warehousing in an enterprise can mean the difference between organized data that powers impactful business decisions and each business branch drawing different conclusions, and the resulting chaos.
Data warehousing is ultimately a process, flowing from the data produced to the warehouse, and transforming data as needed. This includes:
- Sorting and staging information (separate from day-to-day operations)
- Optimizing data to be easily accessed and analyzed
While enterprises can’t avoid the work that goes into a data warehouse, they can employ a savvy expert to help implement a thoughtful process that harnesses all company data for the most powerful business intelligence.
What are a data warehouse and business intelligence consulting?
When a business either reimagines or establishes its data warehouse, it’s critical to consider the entire system, treating the data warehouse platform as an entirely separate entity from an operational database, and storing data in such a way that business leaders can sort by a variety of subject matter, such as customers, products, or business unit or activity.
This includes:
- Analyzing the business and gathering requirements
- Modeling with logical and physical data
- Conducting a source system data analysis
- Source to target data mapping analysis and design
- Quality Assurance (QA)
- Information delivery development
How can data warehousing benefit your business?
- Power better business decisions – Data warehousing can increase the speed and efficiency for leaders to access datasets and help decision-makers use insights from the data to power their decision making. It also helps avoid incomplete or inaccurate data.
- Cut costs and improve efficiency – When business leaders are able to easily view historical data, they can assess strategic initiatives and activities and adjust the overarching strategy to boost sales and increase efficiency.
- Establish consistency – Data warehouses apply a uniform format to all data, which makes data easy to share and analyze across any location. In addition, a standardized dataset is easier to accurately interpret.
What should your business expect from a DW and BI consulting company?
IT, as its name suggests, is a very technical space, and you should expect your consultants to possess an IT development background, and ideally, prior experience with data warehousing and business intelligence.
One of the key differences with our Genies is the wealth of experience they already possess when they start consulting for our customers. We consulting on our first data warehouse years ago.
Strong communication is also a must. Any DW and BI expert already has her work cut out for her translating a technical topic into terms business leaders can easily work with. Trying to also work on in-language communication skills will muddy any important communication. Since TechGenies has offices dispersed around the globe, this is easily solved by recruiting a local team.
Diverse database development language skills. An entirely different type of language, a consultant’s expertise in SQL, P/L SQL, C, C++, Perl Scripting, or other languages is important.
Finally, IT consultants should be forward-looking, able to speak to moving data warehousing to the cloud and considerate of any future needs that could influence your business’ data security needs.
Propel your organization beyond basic databases and slow-moving analytics and ignite business insights with a savvy data warehouse that will streamline your BI and ultimately, improve your bottom line. Our Genies can start from scratch or consult on an existing system – just let us know what you need at info@techgenies.com
