Speed, agility and proven outcomes in data warehousing

9th January 2020BlogJames Cherry

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To thrive in the digital economy, enterprises need real-time access to a consistent, high-quality repository of business information: namely, a data warehouse.

Data warehouse projects have a strongly negative reputation for cost and time overruns, for risk of outright failure, and for their inflexibility in responding to ongoing change in business requirements. To overcome these challenges, Northdoor proposes a repeatable solution for data warehousing, combining highly skilled consultants with advanced tooling to enable speed, surety and adaptability.

the northdoor data warehouse solution

Competitive advantage from data

In the digital economy, success increasingly hinges on the ability to turn vast quantities of data into business insight at high speed. Marshalling your information resources will enable not only faster awareness of the current opportunities and risks, but also predictive analytics, whereby you can use data to steer the business more intelligently. However, most companies use a diverse array of different applications and databases, and their data is spread across numerous systems, both on-premises and in the cloud.

By contrast, data warehouses are designed to deliver a single version of the truth – even if operational systems remain in departmental silos, use different data models and definitions, and store data in multiple formats.

As many enterprises have found to their cost over the years, the gap between the promise of a data warehouse and its actual value can be extremely wide. Data warehouse solution projects have one of the worst reputations in the industry for overrunning on both budget and planned timescales, for failing to deliver the promised outcomes, and for rapidly becoming obsolete as business requirements change.

Data warehouse woes

The sheer scope of a data warehouse project means that it is likely to be beyond the internal competence within most enterprises. Even if a company has people with the appropriate skills in-house, it may not be able to commit them full-time to a data warehouse project. Equally, because they lack experience in delivering data warehouse projects, companies often jump into building a technical solution before completing the necessary groundwork around data standards and data quality.

The long timescales associated with traditional data warehouse projects means that your business will continue to evolve while the data warehouse project works towards a defined outcome. The need to adapt the project in-flight to these changes ramps up the cost and introduces delays, creating a vicious circle.

Aside from tackling the considerable technical challenges in getting a data warehouse up and running, companies must also create the right organisational structures, procedures and habits to ensure ongoing value from the project.

The Northdoor solution

Drawing on decades of experience in helping blue-chip companies turn data into insight, Northdoor has built a packaged, repeatable approach to creating and managing data warehouses. Armed with tooling and frameworks developed during the course of numerous customer engagements, Northdoor experts can take businesses from a blank sheet of paper all the way through to a functioning, scalable data warehouse – rapidly, reliably and at relatively low cost.

Northdoor’s high‑speed approach helps avoid the major challenge caused by scope creep, which is that business objectives may have completely changed by the time the data warehouse is delivered.

Fast, agile, reliable

The value of the Northdoor data warehouse offering rests on three pillars: speed, agility and proven outcomes. While a traditional data warehouse project can last three years, Northdoor typically delivers in less than 12 months, while saving up to 80 percent of project costs.

During the implementation phase, Northdoor automation tools and methodology reduce the cost and timescales for a typical project to just 20 percent of those for a manually developed solution. In addition, you can also expect to reduce the impact of scope changes during the project – for example, new source data or analytics requirements – by 80 percent.

Once your data warehouse is up and running, the Northdoor tooling remains in place under a perpetual licence, enabling you to automatically implement amendments to your warehouse model as business requirements change. For more information, please contact us.

Download our Data Warehouse Solution Overview PDF


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