Datasheet

Part I: The Data Warehouse: Home for Your Data Assets

If your company’s data warehouse were advertised as a product for sale, it

might be described this way: “Contains high-quality, refined and purified

information, all of which has undergone a 25-point quality check and is

offered to you with a warranty to guarantee hassle-free ownership so that

you can better monitor the performance of your business.”

Classifying data: What is a data asset?

Okay, I promised a definition free of technical and business-school jargon —

but in the preceding section, I introduced a term (data asset) that might be

considered jargon. So, I’ll clarify what the term data asset means.

You can classify data that’s managed within an enterprise in three groupings:

✓ Run-the-business data: Produced by corporate applications, such as

the one your company uses to fill customer orders for its products or

the one your company uses to manage financial transactions. The raw

materials for a data warehouse.

✓ Integrate-the-business data: Built to improve the quality of and synchro-

nize two or more corporate applications, such as a master list of cus-

tomers. Data leveraged to integrate applications that weren’t designed

to work with each other.

✓ Monitor-the-business data: Presented to end users for reporting and

decision support, such as your financial dashboard. The data is cleansed

to enable users to better understand progress and evaluate cause-and-

effect relationships in the data.

A data asset is the result of taking the raw material from the run-the-business

data and producing higher-quality-data end products to integrate the busi-

ness and monitor the business. Your data warehouse team should have the

mission of providing high-quality data assets for enterprise use.

Manufacturing data assets

Most organizations build a data warehouse for manufactured data assets in a

relatively straightforward manner, following these steps:

1. The data warehousing team (usually computer analysts and program-

mers) selects a focus area, such as tracking and reporting the company’s

product sales activity against that of its competitors.

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