Increasingly, companies need their information sources to be adaptive enough to anticipate and to respond to change. This depends heavily on management’s timely access to trusted information about its operations and the customers it serves. Therefore, success is dependent on the IT organization collaborating closely with the business. In order to make corporate information meet business needs, it must be in sync with the company’s business model. Therefore, looking at information management through the lens of industry best practices is the best way to ensure collaboration. This is not an easy task to accomplish. The typical IT organization often has trouble understanding the data requirements from a business unit as well as the overall corporate context.

This whitepaper examines why the traditional approach to this problem — implementing departmentally-focused data marts to manage the reporting requirements of individual business units — can no longer succeed in the modern era. It goes on to discuss how, to be successful, the corporation needs consistency in data definitions that apply across all business units, while retaining the flexibility to deploy departmental reporting analysis solutions. Achieving this goal requires a three-phased approach: first, the development of an enterprise-wide business vocabulary; second, a comprehensive data model that provides a framework for the consistent consolidation of data; and third, data marts designed to support the reporting requirements of the organization.

The whitepaper explains this approach in detail.