Organizing Data Warehouse Service Providers

Companies create organizational units to build, maintain, and operate data warehouses. These data warehouse service providers differ in how they are placed in the organization's structure, the services they perform, and how they collaborate with business units and internal and external IT service providers.A study conducted to better understand current practices identified four distinct approaches-full service providers, business service providers, data warehouse platform providers, and data warehouse competency centers-that differ in their performance of specific data warehousing tasks and services. To better understand the differences, four exemplar case studies were also conducted. This article discusses the pros and cons of the different approaches. The findings provide useful insights into how companies should organize data warehouse service providers.