Modern organizations must react quickly to competitive threats and new potential market opportunities. More then ever before, organizations need up-to-date, comprehensive, and easily accessible data. Business Intelligence had long been a key method for making this available, and in recent years became the most common technique of serving data to this environment by replicating data into a Data Warehouse (DW) architecture. Now, BI/DW architectures must evolve quickly to meet the rapidly increasing demands of today’s businesses.
From a business perspective traditional BI face the following challenges:
- Lack of business agility: rigidity in the traditional BI/DW architecture prevents new or ad-hoc data requests from being fulfilled on time
- Lost revenue opportunities: high latency in processing and delivering important data
- High costs: tightly coupled systems make the modifications required to align to business needs expensive
- Incomplete information for decision making: challenges in accessing disparate enterprise, web and unstructured data
- Limited self-service opportunities: multiple layers of processing make it difficult for business users to operate without significant IT assistance