Managerial considerations

T he architectural advantage of having a separate, customized repository of data for decision-support applications was recognized as early as the 1970s, when these systems were first developed [6]. In the mid-1980s, large retail, banking, and telecommunications corporations began building data warehouses , even though the term was not coined until the late 1980s by Bill Inmon [4]. Driving this development were business needs arising from such changes as fragmentation of mass markets into microsegments with special needs and the introduction of specialized technology by IBM and Teradata [5]. In the early 1990s, more data warehousing tools became available, and data warehousing became one of the hottest developments in the corporate computing world. Today, most large organizations either have built a data warehouse or are at least seriously thinking about doing so. And more than 900 hardware, software , and services vendors now specialize in data warehousing technology. Organizational resistance on many fronts can derail the most promising systems, even those designed to address a specific organizational pain.