The Business Value of Data Warehouses : Opportunities, Pitfalls and Future Directions

Abstract: Organisations have spent billions of dollars (USD) on investments in data warehouses. Many have succeeded, but many have also failed. These failures are considered mostly to be of an organisational nature and not of a technological, as one might have expected. Due to the failures, organisations have problems to derive business value from their data warehouse investments. Obtaining business value from data warehouses is necessary, since the investment is of such a magnitude that it is clearly visible in the balance sheet. In order to investigate how the business value may be increased, we have conducted an extensive literature study, aimed at identifying opportunities and future directions, which may alleviate the problem of low return on investment. To balance the work, we have also identified pitfalls, which may hinder organisations to derive business value from their data warehouses. Based on the literature survey, we have identified and motivated possible research areas, which we consider relevant if organisations are to derive real business value from their data warehouses. These areas are: ' Integrating data warehouses in knowledge management. ' Data warehouses as a foundation for information data super stores. ' Using data warehouses to predict the need for business change. ' Aligning data warehouses and business processes. As the areas are rather broad, we have also included examples of more specific research problems, within each possible research area. Furthermore, we have given initial ideas regarding how to investigate those specific research problems.