For years companies have spent their energy gathering and hoarding data. Data about their customers, their potential customers, their customers’ customers, their employees, their employees’ sales figures, their revenues, their costs, and so on and so forth ad nauseum. Basically not a bad idea either, considering the fact that, generally speaking, the more information you have to base your decisions on, the better your decisions should be. The more information you have about your company and market, the higher your chances should be of recognizing and utilizing possibilities, identifying and avoiding pit-falls, and ultimately boosting your return on investment.
This idea of business intelligence (BI) has been, and is, a large issue for organizations and companies throughout the world. According to some experts, BI is (or should be) one of the top priorities of all companies today. Sounds important - and it is.
Logically, collecting data alone won’t help companies at all. Just having the information doesn’t help, if it cannot be easily found, accessed, and used for analytical purposes.
And here lies the crux.
You can imagine the excitement in the office when Mr. Data Compliance from The Large, Famous and Very Expensive Consulting Company comes to do his audit and finds zillions of Excel spreadsheets stored locally on individual desktops. (Ahh, thank you, Bill Gates - gotta love the guy.)
Obviously, management and IT have got to entertain open communication channels in order to design systems (data warehouse systems) that businesses 1) want, 2) need, and 3) will/can actually use.
It’s not always as easy as it sounds. Data warehouse experts are often confronted with seemingly non-combinable heterogeneous systems and varying management requirements. Systems can only be as good as their architecture and the quality of their data (and the good-will of Frau Tralala who feeds the system with the (hopefully relevant) information). To get an idea of some of the problem areas, here is a pertinent post from a self confessed data warehouse noob.
Why am I writing about this now? Well, because I have a customer who is looking for such an expert, and hence I am, too.
Who are we really looking for?
Well, we’re looking for somebody for the conceptualization and design of such a system (at a company in Vienna). We’re looking for somebody with more than 5 years of experience in heterogeneous IT systems, business logic knowledge, and the ability to understand and implement complex requirements and needs.
Want to learn more? Please contact me for a job specification.
For others, here is a site with more-or-less understandable information about business intelligence and data warehousing. And here something for the easily intimidated. Here’s a post called datawarehousing for cavemen (again more for the quickly daunted).
data warehouse business intelligence BI DWH IT job Vienna database architecture design conceptualization information mining
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