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INDUSTRIES
October 09, 2007
Enterprise Data: Both Important And Neglected?
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director,
Customer Interaction Solutions magazine
Why do so many companies seem to be clueless when it comes to correctly using the data they clearly possess? That's easy. Their data reside in multiple vast silos, and never the twain (or thrain or frain…and yes, I am making those words up) shall ever meet. But what to do about it? Replace the whole system? No…too expensive in both time and money. This sort of creates, as you would imagine, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
According to a recent market survey conducted by Dataupia Corporation and the Business Intelligence Network, when it comes to data warehouse platforms, today’s enterprises favor incremental augmentation over “rip and replace” solutions.
The study’s findings revealed that 75 percent of respondents surveyed would rather incrementally augment their current platform than engage in a rip and replace scenario to meet growing information and data warehousing demands. While this statistic on its own was not surprising, drivers such as budget approval, overall cost and time constraints shed light on the current state of data warehousing within the enterprise.
The survey results also showcase a common dilemma facing many data warehousing administrators and business today: pressure to deliver faster, more complex query reporting across multiple databases and new applications with current infrastructure constraints and interoperability limitations. The old “making more with less” scenario so popular in American business.
The Dataupia/Business Intelligence Network survey shows that with a rip-and-replace solution, the time from initial budget approval to deployment, as well as cost, are big concerns for enterprises across industries. Seventy-five percent of those polled said it would take more than a year to revamp their infrastructure and implement a new data warehouse solution.
Drilling down even further, more than half (53 percent) estimated it could take one to three years to gain budget approval for such a project. (One has to imagine that given the way business technology changes, any company with a three-year approval process to buy new technology should just give up pretending to do business now and quietly go lay on a beach somewhere.)
Seventy-one percent said that it would cost more than $500,000 to replace their current systems, and almost half (46 percent) reported that the cost would fall between $1 and $3 million. These expenses are largely attributed to the many interdependent parts of a data warehouse platform. Once the data warehouse database is replaced, the chances of having to change other components of the infrastructure become higher, creating a domino effect and dramatically increasing the overall budget.
The thought of revamping a data warehouse infrastructure was so daunting to enterprises that when asked the likelihood of their organization approving a new platform, respondents reported that only 20 percent would be likely to do so even if a good business case could be made.
So whither the data? When asked who owns customer/client/patient data in the company, survey answers varied. The percentage differences were negligible across Finance, IT, Marketing, Operations and Sales, with thirteen percent of those surveyed reporting they do not know who owns the data within their organization. Additionally, the survey findings rank access to data as the most important attribute of the organization’s business information infrastructure. (Which means that there are conceivably companies out there that rate access to data as a most important factor to business success, but still confess that they have no idea where the information resides.)
The notion of data access across different departments speaks to the unique needs and demands of today’s organization. The more individuals within the organization that can access data for their specific functions, the greater the value of those data.
The full survey results are worth a look. You can view them at www.dataupia.com/surveyresults.
