Data Warehousing – An Untapped Market
There is a huge market in India for business intelligence. The compilation and storage of all the data relating to a company or industry in one place, and in a manner which is easy to access and retrieve is known as data warehousing. It is the biggest tool for business analysis and business intelligence.
The data is usually transactional records like purchases, etc which is transferred from a data source to a central data location, which is essentially the data warehouse and then given out to business users in the organization. This system uses a data modelling tool.
A data warehouse maintains its functions in three layers: staging, integration, and access. Staging is used to store raw data for use by developers (analysis and support). The integration layer is used to integrate data and to have a level of abstraction from users. The access layer is for getting data out for users.
The main data required is sorted out and transferred, and then put into separate folders to be used by managers and other professionals. These are used for data mining, online analytical processing, market research and decision support. The most important part is to be able to retrieve, analyze, extract, transform and load data, manage it into data dictionary and make use of it.
The hallmark of enterprise data warehousing is the ability to anticipate questions and provide answers, thereby enhancing the business intelligence of an enterprise.
The cutting edge of data warehousing is therefore to be able to provide artificial intelligence to the database enabling it to answer the most complex and unexpected queries.
When several businesses grow, domestic competition increases, consolidation occurs, foreign players enter the market. Business cannot rely purely on the growth of the market and it is business intelligence that offers value over and above the natural growth rate. Data warehousing and resulting business intelligence help businesses to become smarter and helped to accelerate growth in India.
The level of awareness is very high but the implementation is low, which is why India is a large untapped market. Project monitoring is another challenging aspect which makes use of data warehousing application. Diverse projects have a plethora of information and to be able to search from that ocean is a Herculean task, data warehousing thus helps to integrate it into a single database.
This is something which if implemented with the right knowledge in the right way can make a mountain of difference to the way businesses are run, the profitability, the accuracy and efficiency with which things are handled .There is a great future lying ahead for this field.
