FOUR BIG QUESTIONS EVERY CDO SHOULD ASK THE VP OF DATA WAREHOUSING

What does the term data warehouse mean here today?

This industry, over the past 20 years, has seen many vendors forging definitions for data warehousing that conveniently matched their current technology capabilities. It’s left the industry in such confusion that it’s important to surface what each party’s definition of data warehousing is before having a conversation about it.

Organizations go on for years and even decades without having this documented. To a large degree, it doesn’t matter what the definition is for the company, but it matters that team members, and the user community, see it similarly. This is especially paramount between the CDO and the VP of Data Warehousing.

Is the data warehouse the large physical database? Does the term include the data marts? How about the data lake(s), which many are using as a term that overrides their (databases formerly known as the) data warehouses? Does it include only those databases under central control? Only those databases that are “architected”?

Some use the term to mean the entire analytics infrastructure. Is the VP of Data Warehousing the VP of that? This leads me to my next couple of questions.

For the other three questions, please see here.