by Don Jones

Certainly. The fact is that many companies are a lot alike in the data they generate and the decisions they need to make; retailers are all very similar, even though they may be selling different products. This similarity allows data warehousing vendors to offer niche products that are pre-designed for a given industry or field; to implement the solution, they simply have to create a data extraction process to load the data warehouse from the organization’s data. Today’s data stores tend to be easily accessed and connected through standard protocols, so the extraction process can be fairly straightforward for a skilled implementer.

Other business intelligence vendors offer “express” products designed to be implemented in less time but that often offer a reduced feature set. These are more suitable for smaller and midsize businesses that also tend to have a larger set of common business needs with each other. These “light” data warehousing products may not address every single business need, but they do help collect data and answer questions for a valuable set of core business needs that tend to be common across their target company size.

But don’t underestimate the value of building a real data warehouse from scratch. Doing so requires a lot of planning and forces you to tackle overarching business issues that really have nothing to do with the technology. You’re forced, for example, to define what questions you really want to ask about your business. You’re forced to decide what you consider “success” and “failure” in your business, and you’re forced to document exactly which factors support success and failure. You may be forced to confront and deal with past decisions that may not have panned out-such as older business systems that don’t expose their data in a way that can support a data warehouse. The planning process that leads to a data warehouse really forces an organization to look at itself with a magnifying glass, and that in and of itself can help set the organization on the road to success.

About the Author

Don Jones has more than a decade of professional experience in the IT industry. He's the author of more than 30 IT books, including Windows PowerShell: TFM; VBScript, WMI, and ADSI Unleashed; Managing Windows with VBScript and WMI; and many more. He's a top-rated and in-demand speaker at conferences such as Microsoft TechEd and TechMentor, and writes the monthly Windows PowerShell column for Microsoft TechNet Magazine. Don is a multiple-year recipient of Microsoft's "Most Valuable Professional" (MVP) Award with a specialization in Windows PowerShell. Don's broad IT experience includes work in the financial, telecommunications, software, manufacturing, consulting, training, and retail industries and he's one of the rare IT professionals who can not only "cross the line" between administration and software development, but also between IT workers and IT management. Don is a co-founder of Concentrated Technologies, and serves as author and series editor for Realtime Publishers.