White paper - Data Warehousing - Fact or Best Guess? The decision making disconnect

Rely on business insight—not just intuition. Guide business strategy more effectively with IBM DB2 Warehouse solutions for small data warehouse implementations...

In recent years, small and large organizations alike have seen rapid increases in the amounts of company and customer data available to them.

For many companies, however, an inability to easily access and use this information strategically limits their ability to optimize operational efficiencies and differentiate themselves from the competition.

And given commoditization and intense competitive pressures, businesses need every advantage they can get to deliver higher service levels, increase efficiency and address regulatory requirements.

Chances are your systems contain all of the hard evidence that business leaders need to understand trends and make informed decisions.

The problem is you don’t have a way to easily and cost-efficiently compile and analyze the data—so your organization’s decision makers must rely heavily on experience and intuition.

But what intuition suggests and what data shows are often surprisingly different.

Take the example of a small bank in the northwestern United States.

Bank management assumed that wealthy clients who made large deposits were the bank’s most profitable clients.

However, after implementing a solution that enabled bank leaders to analyze customer profitability, they realized that the opposite was true. Wealthy clients were savvy negotiators who typically negotiated all of the profits out of the instruments they purchased from the bank.

In fact, smaller, more modest investors were more profitable—the bank just needed a strategy to attract more of them.

Transform information into a strategic asset with a data warehouse
In any industry—whether you work in a small business or in a large company — if you can’t compile and analyze historical data, you can’t separate facts from best guesses to maximize your competitive advantage.

And the reason that many organizations can’t get to this information is a lack of integration among company data sources ranging from desktops to legacy systems, servers and intranets.

While it may be easy to access current sales or financial data in a single system, pulling together different types of historical data from multiple systems to see whether you can find any business opportunities is another story.

Fortunately, there is an easy and costeffective way to compile and analyze your data for strategic advantage: a data warehouse.

In fact, a data warehouse— which is a central repository of information from the systems across your business—can help you improve decision making and give flight to new ideas across key strategic areas of your business, including:

• Sales analysis. Understand the regions and time periods in which products are selling, and identify the factors that contribute to wins and losses.
• Customer relationship management. Better understand who your customers are, what they want and what they’re buying so you can give them what they want.
• Resource planning. Identify costcutting opportunities and budget trends to support better investment decisions.

Make more informed decisions: IBM DB2 Warehouse software
An IBM DB2 Warehouse solution can provide a data warehouse that delivers an up-to-the-moment, single view of company-wide data without overstretching your IT team or bank account.

By integrating data sources ranging from spreadsheets to heterogeneous, siloed, legacy systems, DB2 Warehouse can help decision makers capitalize on an organization-wide view of the information.

And with the help of online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining capabilities from IBM Business Partners, the software can help you navigate and find hidden relationships in your data to spark innovative ideas and see new business opportunities.

DB2 Warehouse software includes a powerful graphical tool, called the SQW warehousing tool, for designing, deploying and loading the warehouse to support data mining and analytics activities. And an easy-to-use interface makes it possible for a wide range of employees to access the capabilities.

Moreover—unlike some small-scale data warehouse solutions from thirdparty vendors that support only limited, difficult-to-scale solutions—flexibility is a key attribute of DB2 Warehouse software.

DB2 Warehouse can support both operational and transactional workloads and prioritize different requests, organizations and users. The architecture also enables you to add more complex workloads, and it easily scales as your business requirements demand.

A vast network of IBM Business Partners underpins DB2 Warehouse solutions.

Business Partners provide an added layer of local support as well as solutions that are proven to integrate easily with IBM technology.

Clear insight, costs and a growth path
Let’s face it, if you can’t deploy a data warehouse relatively quickly and maintain it with existing staff, then you probably don’t want one.

What’s more, if it doesn’t start adding value soon after it’s in place, then it’s hard to justify the investment.

Whether it’s by providing new insight through summarized data or through the output of a Business Partner application analyzing the key metrics for your business, DB2 Warehouse software can begin delivering insight as soon as your data is loaded.

To help simplify the deployment of a data warehouse, IBM offers the IBM Balanced Warehouse solution.

Specifically designed to jump-start smaller warehousing implementations, the IBM Warehouse C class provides out-of-thebox solutions that include preintegrated, preconfigured DB2 Warehouse software and IBM systems and storage technology that are pretested to support optimal performance.

Based on nonproprietary, readily available hardware, IBM Balanced Warehouse solutions can be easily reused and redeployed depending on changing business needs.

They’re competitively priced and simple to use, and they scale easily as your business grows, helping to reduce hidden costs related to training, maintenance and growth.

If you want to implement a data warehouse solution on your own hardware, you can also choose from three different competitively priced versions of the DB2 Warehouse software—based on the features that make sense for your business.

IBM’s data warehouse offerings are flexible and agile so you can implement a solution that supports your current business needs and scale it all the way up to hundreds of terabytes of data.

Take comfort in knowing that you can transform your data into reliable, consistent business insight and easily grow your data warehouse if your requirements change.

For further information contact your IBM Concierge and mention priority code 2C7BM23D. They will connect you with an appropriate expert.

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