For many years the concepts of Business Intelligence and The Data Warehouse were inextricably linked, and for good reason. There was a time that before you could have any meaningful business intelligence information, you first needed to gather together all of your organization’s data into the warehouse. Unfortunately, for many organizations, what started out as a business intelligence project became sidetracked into an unnecessarily large and complex data warehouse effort that lost sight of the original business intelligence objectives. Organizations became bogged down trying to identify and organize ALL of the enterprise’s information into the warehouse, rather than focusing on what was needed to satisfy the BI objectives.

In his classic book “The Seven Habits of Effective People”, Steven Covey states “begin with the end in mind”. We think this is good advice for business intelligence projects as well. Most large organizations have more data than they know what to do with. We think it’s a mistake to get bogged down into identifying and organizing all of the available data. Think about it. Is any decision maker really concerned with ALL the data? Probably not. But decision makers are concerned with getting their hands on the RIGHT data, that key information needed to make effective, business-changing decisions. So we say begin your BI project with the end in mind. Find out what key data is required by the decision makers, then set about the task of identifying and making that key information available to the decision maker.

Many organizations have extremely successful and well managed data warehouse implementations. For these organizations, the data warehouse will likely continue to serve them well into the future. For others, a new breed of business intelligence tools like QlikView are providing a different route to providing this key information. Rather than relying on disk-based data sources, these tools use an in-memory model to that by-passes the need for the data warehouse and provides the business decision maker direct access to any number of data sources. Whether this new breed of tool will replace the need for the traditional warehouse remains to be seen. Regardless of the approach, it’s critical to stay focused on helping decision makers get the key information needed and resist the pitfalls of unnecessary complexity.