New survey reveals on 11 percent of organizations conduct real-time updates and refreshments of their data warehouses
Arlington, MA — July 14, 2003 — There's been a lot of talk among vendors and business intelligence proponents about the need to update and refresh data warehouses in real time. In practice, however, few organizations currently conduct real-time (or near real-time) data warehouse updates and refreshments.
Cutter Consortium recently conducted a study on the role of data warehousing and business intelligence practices in organizations worldwide. The resulting analysis is supported by responses from more than 142 companies.
Curt Hall, a Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant, provided analysis of the data. He remarked, "Our survey indicates that most organizations currently tend to perform daily or monthly updates and refreshments of their data warehouses. Moreover, just 11 percent of organizations overall conduct real-time (or near real-time) updates and refreshments of their data warehouses."
Hall noted that although the use of real-time data warehousing is currently limited, companies should plan on seeing its use increase significantly over the next few years for a number of reasons. Chief among them is the growing use of data warehousing and business intelligence to support a broad range of business performance measurement initiatives like customer analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain intelligence and enterprise performance management.
"Each of these applications," he said, "are increasingly requiring that data warehouses support the real-time or near real-time integration of transaction data with data acquired from other sources within and beyond the enterprise. This requirement will further the use of real-time data warehousing techniques among organizations as they seek to enhance their data warehousing/BI environments to support the 'instantaneous analysis' needs of their tactical and strategic analytical applications."
Cutter said the use of real-time data warehousing is just one example of the kinds of issues Curt Hall examines in his report, "Corporate Use of Data Warehousing and Enterprise Analytic Technologies," available now from Cutter Consortium.
