In my last blog, we discussed the ever changing face of data warehousing. As the data warehouse evolves, so does the decision support system that is built on the platform of the data warehouse. We are moving from historical and analytical decision support to event driven decision support.

What this means is, instead of observing patterns and trends from historical data and then influencing changes in your business workflow, you will introduce data as events occur in your operational systems into the data warehouse, and take instant measurements and provide the results for analysis and decision support.

Event driven data integration will require significant data architecture and data mapping efforts from operational systems to the data warehouse. There are multiple ways to implement this with ETL/ELT/CDC types of technologies. But do not forget that you will need to pay attention to data quality, metadata and master data management in addition to all the other details. Last but not least; you will need to remember that all of this needs to happen with extreme agility.

The event driven decision support system is being implemented across many organizations today and there are a lot of growing and learning pains with the early adopters. But the rewards are equally there. These organizations have been able to leverage value from their EPM and BPM initiatives, thanks to event-driven data integration. Executives are getting information on their data enabled phones and are making decisions while not being physically present in their offices. All of the technology and innovation has helped make this possible, but without data and data integration, this would still be a pipe dream.

Data volumes have grown due to the increase of streaming data. Imagine the data from all sources including Ttwitter, Facebook, MmySpace, LinkedIn, and your regular text sources like, voice and media. We are definitely going to need some rational and radical thinking tof data integration to the data warehouse of tomorrow. Just like our debate on DW2.0, data architects and developers can look to have more excitement in the coming months and years.