One example from real life: Mr. Bartel, the company CFO, picks up the last quarterly report. As far as he can tell, everything looks pretty good. But the reports from the individual companies are included as well. When he starts comparing the individual reports with the consolidated report, nothing seems to make sense anymore; he cannot understand how the figures have been collated. Moreover, there are numerous footnotes in the reports referring to exclusions, special inclusions, and other periodic classifications, plus various links here and there. Mr. Bartel feels completely in the dark. Just what is the company’s real position? Which of the figures should he trust?

This little story, although itself fictitious, describes a situation frequently found in reality, especially in large companies. Although in recent years firms have invested large sums of money in the creation of data warehouse solutions and have used this foundation to set up performance indicator reporting with the help of modern front-end tools, the quality of these reports often leaves much to be desired. This is all the more disturbing because solutions based on data warehousing are being utilized more and more in critical business areas such as corporate management, corporate performance management, risk management, and areas relevant for audits. These are precisely the areas where the exactness and reliability of the information are especially important.

New technologies – but a lack of new information culture 

The idea behind the data warehouse is promising indeed: integration of all of the source data required for reporting into one database, maintained separately from the operational databases, plus the utilization of specific data structures which enable the generation of various business views on the data, including historical data, and support the provision of query results within an acceptable response time. The data can be accessed using modern OLAP (online analytical processing) tools with analysis and reporting functions and attractive visualization features. In the 1990s, the initiative for these solutions came mostly from the corporate IT departments, but later increasingly from the various business departments such as controlling or sales controlling.