Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing as a Solution Essay

As it is anticipated that there is a fundamental objective of the company to reduce costs, make informed decisions and consolidate information, there is urgent need to for resilient development of the business intelligence and data warehousing (Collier, 2012). The poor response by IT in the provision of strategic information indicates that the system is incapable of guiding the company to success. This is a potential threat to the prosperity of the business, and hence a quicker intervention is required to ensure success is attained. Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing as a Solution The implementation of BI and DWH services in the sales department would ensure a sustained growth and a competitive edge to the company. Integration of business intelligence would cover the use of information necessary to drive the organization insight. Operational business intelligence would produce an improved analysis of sales data and provide in-depth knowledge of the performance indicators of the marketing department such as the customers of the company, competitors, economic environment and internal operations that would in turn help in making efficient and best quality sales and marketing decisions (Collier, 2012). Also, the concept of data warehousing would enable a central integration and management of sales and marketing database containing data from the four operational sources in the department from heterogeneous sources. The created database would contain structured sales data for query analysis and can be accessed by all the authorized users. The good news reads that th e data warehouse can be created and updated at any time, with limited disruption of the operational systems (Simon, 2014). There is a broad set of technologies, applications and knowledge for gathering and analyzing sales data for the purpose of helping users make sales and marketing decisions. Issues Needed to be Addressed There is need to integrate BI and DWH applications in the operational systems as there is a significant requirement of current data for the purposes of sales. These tools are critical in supporting the sales and marketing decision makers in the organization. However, without proper governance, it would a long-awaited dream to achieve the value offered by BI and DWH. As such, there is urgent need to develop BI/DWH governance framework in the sales and marketing department based on universal principles and clear information ownership and dissemination. Essentially, there is a need for designing, implementing and making effective use of BI tools to achieve marketing objectives and increase revenue returns. Summary Making the most of the company’s data assets is the purpose of BI at a high level. The company would increase its competitive advantage such as reducing costs, increasing investment returns, reducing risks by making best data-driven decisions through a structured BI. Therefore, we can begin by developing the governance framework through designing, executing, monitoring and controlling and implementing to enhance proper management of the company sales data. References Collier, K. (2012). Agile analytics: A value-driven approach to business intelligence and data warehousing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley. Simon, A. R. (2014). Enterprise business intelligence and data warehousing: Program management essentials. Source document