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Message Posted: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 @ 17:11:30 GMT

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I'll throw in my two cents on the topic.

I completely agree with Jason's comments in terms of trying to understand how a data warehouse has improved business for the organization. The probelm is, as has been pointed out, this is sometimes very difficult to do, for a variety of reasons.

However, computing the value of anything has to factor in the costs as well. And to that end, I think a data warehouse team has to be in a position to provide upper management with metrics about the costs of operation for the data warehouse asset. Using the warehouse to increase profits by $2 M a year may not make much sense if the costs involved are $3 M/year.

To that end, the data warehouse team needs to capture detailed system operations data and providing metrics that show how effectively this organizational asset is utilized. In that respect, it is no different than any other significant corporate asset. Making the system as efficient and effective as possible drives down costs, improving the overal ROI. Which is always a good thing.

While most of us may have little ability to influence how effectively business users leverage the information in the data warehouse, we typically have many opportunities to affect the value equation through performance tuning, workload management, workload balancing, etc.

Thomas F. Stanek
APP Consulting, Inc. (Formerly TFS Consulting, Inc.)

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