This article is part of the Issue 2 February 2012 issue of Enterprise data warehouse not dead yet

Many business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing efforts begin as technology-driven initiatives. The IT department buys hardware and software to build a BI system with little to no business involvement. Over time, these IT driven projects accumulate multiple tool sets for data acquisition, end user reporting and other facets of the BI and data warehousing process. Independently from IT, business units undertake their own BI initiatives, buying more software. In addition, the organization has probably implemented an enterprise resource planning system that came with its own set of BI tools. The end result of all of these factors is a multi-tool environment that often is difficult and costly to maintain. Many organizations are now looking for ways to simplify and better manage such installations. To achieve that, there are two fundamental approaches: Reduce the number of BI tools to a more manageable level or live with the multi-tool environment but manage it better. Those options are not mutually exclusive, however, and an organization can do both by ... Access >>>