The centralized data warehouse now serves as a conduit for trustworthy and comprehensive business dashboards and reports. The type of reporting necessary for long-term planning and decisions makes this setup invaluable for executives. Additionally, reporting creates an abstraction for a shared and aligned understanding of the business, an otherwise difficult endeavor as it does not exist in the real world. Dashboards and reports create a shared consciousness of the ethereal and intangible entity that is the enterprise.iii
While the insight gained through data centralization and comprehensive reporting provides great strategic and communication value, it still leaves many decision makers in the wilderness. Data warehouses predominantly provide a descriptive and backwards-looking view. In an era where teams across the organization—from marketing to sales to finance—crave data for decision making, finding relevant data in a timely manner represents a Sisyphean task. For most teams, data analytics lacks impact, at least in its current state.iv