Do you need a Data Warehouse?

Companies have invested millions of dollars in building data warehouses and the journey seems to be a never ending one seeking constant investment of funds. Often clients have asked us about how they should build their Information architecture to create a competitive Marketing advantage!

Companies are producing data in "real time" nowadays. When you withdraw money from your ATM you get an almost immediate alert from your bank. But Speed & time have a price. The underlying philosophy of having data in a "real time" basis is to increase the speed and accuracy of business decisions. The goal is to achieve decision-making as near real-time as necessary to deliver maximum value.

Sometime ago I was the CMO of a large & very data savvy Retail bank. The bank had built a Data warehouse but not enough people were using it. In fact people were scared of migrating data into the Data warehouse because each such request came with a solid funding requirement from IT and so many departments preferred to not bring their data into the enterprise DWH.  We eventually managed to build a very vibrant DWH and also a strong Analytical marketing layer around it but the journey was very enlightening.

Previously I also had the experience of managing India's most successful Retail Loyalty program (The First Citizen program at Shoppers' Stop). There I saw the power of building a customer database from scratch-we collected visiting cards of customers and over time we built that into a robust customer database.

In both my above experiences the business leadership team was very clear about how they wanted to use data to impact business results. Also the CEO in each case was passionate about ROI and therefore a customer data led marketing strategy.

I think there are some key questions that you need to ask as you build your business:

1. Is there a clear vision that connects data to business results?

2. Will there be a business owner for the data warehouse? Data warehouse is not an IT only kind of a project. In fact without a clear Business ownership, Data warehouses are destined to fail!

3. Am I maximizing the value of the data that I am collecting?

4. Is it a big struggle to get hold of data and then to analyze it in time?

5. Do you need to give a request to your IT department each time you need data in a certain format?

6. Do I need a "big bang" investment in a data warehouse or do I need to build it "incrementally"?