Chapter 5 - Organizational Integration

Abstract

The ability to obtain information easily is often hindered by a lack of support from the technology department. After a data warehouse is implemented, an organizational change usually must occur to ensure that the business executives can effectively use their data. This chapter outlines the typical organizational supports needed when moving from earlier information systems into a data warehouse. Human integration is a very important part of the data warehouse implementation. To continually improve the data warehouse applications, one also needs to integrate the various business people with the technology people. Essentially, both groups need to undergo a learning process, spend more time with each other and learn to work together to apply technology to solve business problems. Providing people to support a new information infrastructure is an evolutionary process. A data warehouse is used to build information, or create data from data, through an interactive process. Once the data reflect the desired results, they are posted into the functional process. This is one element of an enterprise data warehouse and an operational data store. The interaction and understanding of the two different disciplines may foster a better information-related application development.