Designing A Data Warehouse: Supporting Customer Relationship Management

SUMMARY

To summarize, the EASI data architecture is founded on the original evolvability, availability, sharability, and integrity principles that formed the basis of the database approach. The purpose is to make data available to any application that requires access to it. The benefits are seen as follows :

• It enables an organization to take a strategic approach to building informational systems. The strategic approach requires that the informational systems are built around business imperatives and not around tactical, departmental requirements. If the organization's aspirations lead to an enterprise-wide information system, this method will entirely support that objective.

• Although this is not an application-centric method, it still supports the incremental approach to developing informational systems. So the original need to see a measurable return on investment, with each increment, can be achieved with this approach.

• Having all the applications derive their data from a single source (the data pool), means that a consistent view of the enterprise is available to all users of the information.

• Adding new applications is a relatively straightforward exercise.

• Keeping the data separate from the applications, and at a low level of granularity, makes it far easier for the information system to support the business during inevitable changes of direction.

• Historical data can be made available to new applications immediately, rather than having to build the history after the application is implemented. This means that the applications can begin to add value more quickly.