In working with many large corporations across a variety of industries, it is clear that we all face the reality of rearchitecting data warehouses being common place, whether we want to admit it or not. Since Data warehouses are business driven (rethink your strategy if you have IT driving your warehouse), it is very important that the business leaders championing your effort understand the perils of skirting a well thought out architecture and design.

Several recent articles have brought to light how difficult it can be to determine and maintain accuracy for a piece of data or information.

In our industry we consistently hear about some new technology that will absolutely revolutionize the way we build systems. After watching enough of these technologies come and go I’ve noticed that, without exception, all of them experience a 3 phase life-cycle. Understanding where a technology is in this life-cycle will help you in determining how it may or may not help your company. Let’s look at the stages.

This article will present the types of failures that have been experienced by various data warehouse projects. There is disagreement over the failure rate of data warehouse projects. Rather than contribute to the debate we will detail the types of situations that could be characterized as failures, and leave it to the reader to decide if they truly constitute failure.

Governance is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the continuous exercise of authority over and the performance of functions for an organization”, so “data governance” would seem to mean the exercise of control over data. However, it is not that simple, data does not exist in a vacuum; business processes act on, change and manipulate data. Therefore, when we discuss data governance we can’t forget the need to include business processes in the scope of items to be governed. Successful governance requires identifying the root causes that impede business effectiveness, implementing governance over business processes as well as over data.

Security threats exist against your enterprise information assets, whether it is accessible through the Internet or buried deep within your internal network available only to authorized users. Today’s applications compound this increasing threat by spanning the enterprise infrastructure and the Internet. Vendors supplying applications for IT environments are being pressured by users to quickly provide more functionality and performance to the marketplace to outpace the competition, while sacrificing security.