Data Management

  It is crucial for organizations to have critical and timely information available in order to make decision to make progress and more importantly sustain the business. Hence it is necessary for to be facilitated with software and systems to manage, prioritize and ensure the availability information. Moreover companies should adopt necessary precautions to protect their data and also to efficiently handle the exponential growth of the same.

Quick data retrieval became problematic with the evolution of technologies due to data being distributed among many servers, which eventually caused the introduction of data warehousing. Data warehousing has been accepted as a solution to the burden of managing data, which is considered as an asset of any organization.

Data Warehouse

   A data warehouse by definition is a repository which stores subject-oriented, historical data in an organized and quickly accessible manner, used for analytical processing such as data mining, decision making, querying and other applications.  The concept of data warehousing is strongly interrelated with data access, retrieval, analysis and visualization. Features that comprise it are organization, consistency, time variance, nonvolatile nature, real-time and integration of data, and relational and web based architectures.

   Most of the organizations adhere to the concept not only because of the features revealed above, but also its ability to structure data according to business processes such as shipping, purchasing and inventory and the provision of access to data through web based systems for the end users. In addition to that, data warehouses cater the storage of metadata, which include software programs about data, information on indexing, data summaries and rules to organize data.  Furthermore it is proven that this can benefit a company by providing consolidated information which can be used to infer cost effective solutions and also offload information processing from expensive operational systems onto cheaper servers. Therefore it is irrefutable that companies receive competitive advantage, enhanced customer service and satisfaction, improved business knowledge, help in streamlining business processes and advantages in decision making.

   Nevertheless building and maintaining a data warehouse is extremely expensive. It may also be difficult to incorporate data from legacy systems. Thus, a feasibility analysis is required when deciding to use a data warehouse.