Informatica Perspectives

Tom Davenport has a great post “IT’s Wonderful Life” in his interesting “The Next Big Thing” blog. With the backdrop of the holiday season and the sentimental movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Jimmy Stewart, he muses in his post about the positive things IT has contributed to companies. He cites Wal-Mart (WMT), various airlines and the banking industry as all having benefited from IT’s efforts.

I’d like to take his praise a step further by observing that all his examples are great references for the business benefit of enterprise data warehousing and enterprise data management.

All of these companies have positioned data as an enterprise asset that, when integrated and transformed, enables them to manage far better than if they were simply operating by “gut feel.”

Tom Davenport has a great post “IT’s Wonderful Life” in his interesting “The Next Big Thing” blog. With the backdrop of the holiday season and the sentimental movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Jimmy Stewart, he muses in his post about the positive things IT has contributed to companies. He cites Wal-Mart (WMT), various airlines and the banking industry as all having benefited from IT’s efforts.For example, long before it became a dominant retail force, Wal-Mart used data warehousing and business analytics to implement a world-class supply chain management (SCM) operation. I have worked with companies that have been suppliers to Wal-Mart. I can attest to how effectively Wal-Mart was able to manage these suppliers because they had much better information than those suppliers. It took time for Wal-Mart to achieve its huge size, but they couldn’t have done it without smart retailing and knowing how to take advantage of the power of data.

Airline companies have won awards for their effective use of data warehousing for customer loyalty, flight operations and yield management. Current business and economic conditions make it tough for US domestic airline companies, but as Tom notes they might have gone out of business if not for these IT efforts.

Finally, the banking industry presents a tremendous reference for the business value of data warehousing and analytics. Managing multiple business lines such as retail banking, credit cards, mortgages, and student loans would not have happened without enterprise data management. The key banking marketing initiatives — cross-sell and up-sell — are driven by EDW. Another benefit of harvesting banking data (and one we can all relate to) is fraud detection, which enables banks to protect their customers.

IT’s a wonderful life indeed. EDW and business analytics are key IT initiatives providing great business value.