If data is oil of future then Data Warehouse is the engine and BI is the dashboard of future
Created on 2018-06-18 11:34
Published on 2018-06-22 10:13
“You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.” — Daniel Keys Moran
An employee was a Customer Relationship Manager and was asked to create the CRM system. When the information requirement was gathered it was observed that the employee has only contacts but does not have any details of the sales made to the customer. This is not an isolated case in India's MSME.
Such partial data islands are a big menace to build robust data warehouses that can fuel the BI. The data islands are
- Accounting
- Billing
- Sales and Marketing
- Technical/ Engineering
- Senior Management
- Data used from external service providers
- Human Resources and Admin
- Purchase Department
- Inventory
- continuous flow of online/ offline content generation
- continuous flow of analysis of online/offline content
- etc.
While the Entrepreneur, CEOs and MDs are convinced about the power of data, very few of them get a person who understand the language of these many data islands. While each island head has a complete visibility for the data of his island, he is unaware about data in other islands that is in some or other way connected to his island. As Oracle Certified Database Administrator, one has to handle terabyte of data. As a Chartered Accountant with role of Group Business Planner, one will experience the complexity of handling consolidated business plan of many countries taking data from the data islands in their country. As a Management accountant one will be focusing on the pricing and costing scenarios of each country. The industry need one person with all these diverse qualifications e.g. Oracle DBA, Chartered Accountant and Management Accountant. Above all industry looks for people experienced in handling multi country, multi data island handling experience.
All these diversely qualified and experienced professionals have to act swiftly in time frames and give time to executive teams to prepare and implement response.
The data is an oil and data warehouse engine cannot run without it. The smooth supply of this data creates the following challenges
- Data Consistency among Data islands and at group level and over all time frames
- Timely Data
- Completeness of Data
- Reiability
- Availability/ connectivity
- Granularity
These problems are as serious for MSME as it is for Global Companies and the qualified professionals are in tremendous short supply. One person with diverse qualification and experience is far more valuable than a cross functional team costing huge money, adding complexity taking longer time to produce results and giving lesser time to executive team for preparing and implementing the solutions.
Disruptions are inevitable and so will always be the need of experienced and qualified data scientists with as much diverse qualification and experience as possible all rolled in one. It is advisable for the CEOs and MDs to have CFOs also qualified in IT, Management Accounting, Project Management etc. If you do not have, it is best time to hire CFO services on complex projects having wider impact on business performance where existing CFO's diverse qualification and exposure is limited.
Imagine if you drive a car without dashboard, it is same as data without BI. Big or small, every business in future will thrive on BI. The growth of Google, Amazon and Facebook in short span and existence of many thriving niche companies although small in size, is the acknowledgement of the power of BI.