How Data Warehouse Automation Pays Dividends

By Heine Krog Iversen, CEO, TimeXtender

It goes without saying that the CIO is constantly on the lookout for ways to strengthen the enterprise; discovering new methods to improve IT systems and technology utility for users, while controlling and reducing costs.

For years, CIOs have leveraged the power of data warehouses, reporting, and knowledge derived from business intelligence and analytics. These technologies have provided organizations’ functional departments and respective users with a strategic platform for leveraging its data for better decision making.

Although data warehousing and business intelligence have been instrumental in helping companies grow, the cost side of the equation has been significant. Using that as a backdrop, companies are now taking advantage of data warehouse automation (DWA), which enables the productization of data modeling to significantly reduce the time to create the database schema needed to deploy the data warehouse. DWA enables user access to business intelligence faster while reducing errors at design, implementation, and improvement stages.

As one can imagine, increasing speed, reducing costs, and error mitigation equate to numerous benefits across the organization and help the CIO to achieve objectives. Here are a few ways in which organizations are improving enterprise productivity with DWA:

Reduces IT expenses: Simply put, DWA can save a company a lot of money. It takes less time to build and implement a data warehouse solution, which means less staff, consulting, and integration fees. Given the inherent advantages of automation, modification, upgrades, and maintenance are less expensive to manage. Automation also allows the end-user to make changes in the background while continuing to plow ahead with their work.

Reduces IT staff requirements: Traditionally, it has been required to have IT staff with specific development skills make changes to the data warehouse, but with DWA, changes can be done by business-oriented people with little or no technical training. This frees up IT staff so that they can focus on other infrastructure needs such as security, functionally, outages, upgrades, and efficiency.

Empowers the business user: Since DWA eliminates the need for formal requests for IT support, users are empowered to modify the reporting data model. This leads to more improvements and productivity. Even more, if a user needs a change and has to wait several weeks for IT to analyze the request and make the improvement, by the time the change takes place, the user has already moved on and the need no longer exist. This significantly reduces the effectiveness of the system.

Recognize benefits sooner: A faster build time means that users and organizations have access to market intelligence, trend analytics, and strategic business information. The old adage “time is money,” has never been truer when it comes to business intelligence, and DWA decreases deployment up to five times faster. This results in maximizing the ROI of the data warehouse and business intelligence program as a whole.

As we have seen in various industries, businesses, and departmental functions, automation can play an instrumental role in helping companies to achieve greater speeds, productivity, and cost reduction. DWA now enables companies deploying and operating data warehouses and business intelligence platforms to achieve those same results.

Heine Krog Iversen is the CEO of TimeXtender, the largest provider of data warehouse automation software for the Microsoft SQL Server. Connect with him on LinkedIn.