Many industries are currently facing an unprecedented degree of change. There has been a significant level of merger and acquisition activity resulting in new international organizations, new players and new competitors. The relationship with customers is changing with new channels emerging such as the Web, call centers and distribution partners. Organizational structures have changed dramatically in the search for increased cost effectiveness.
These changes have a huge impact on a company’s information management strategy. Challenges include the ability to:

• Get a complete view of key entities such as customer, product, account etc.

• Analyze the past, assess the present and consider alternative futures

• Get consistent & meaningful business performance metrics across multiple systems, divisions, products and countries

• Update the data structures as quickly as the business changes

• Meet the increased regulatory demands for reporting under SOX and Basel II

A data warehouse provides a good architectural solution to integrate information and to address these issues. However, traditional approaches to enterprise data warehousing have major disadvantages.  They require extensive modeling of the business in all its complexity and diversity, plus substantial programming effort to implement and maintain. Not only are they costly and time consuming, but they are also fixed at the point of design. By the time a traditional data warehouse is delivered to the users it is often out of date and any business changes typically involve restructuring database tables, which takes significant time and money, not to mention the inadequacy of the information available to the business as the processes are changed.