Why the Data Warehouse is becoming the Data Service

Most senior executives today recognise the need to drive more value out of their data.

The question for systems architects and data engineers is how to deliver what the business requires. The traditional stereotyped view of a Data Warehouse as a repository tacked onto the side of the IT architecture to allow business reporting and analytics is way out of date.

Today’s Data Warehouses are increasingly central to many business processes. Their role in aggregating data from a variety of sources makes them central to a modern data architecture providing the ability to access critical enterprise data at the right time.

The challenge is to integrate critical data from the existing, and often legacy applications/warehouses with new data sets.New data sets, for example those being generated by Big Data, collect and store data we only dreamt about a few years ago (think IoT or web interactions).The technology stack, particularly around Big Data applications, is constantly evolving, adding further complexity.

It is inevitable that there will be a distributed Warehouse environment as the data-centric organization facilitates the provision of all critical enterprise data in a timely manner. For this reason, we believe that what is being created should be known as the Data Service. The technology is there to provide data to a range of downstream business applications of which traditional Business Intelligence (BI) is just one.

This seemingly simple proposition can be very complex in practice. But it may be easier to explain the investment case to the senior executives looking to drive value from their data that you are providing a Data Service to the business rather than discussing the complexity and investment requirements of databases/warehouses. It is after all the data that provides the actionable insights that they are looking for.