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Many of us have managed data warehousing projects for years. Some have delivered highly strategic systems that are treasured by users and valued by top executives. However, others have struggled to sustain interest and funding in their data warehouses even though users are crying out for better, more accurate information. What separates successful from struggling solutions? How does your data warehousing initiative compare to others in the industry? What will it take to get your data warehouse to the next level? Many data warehousing managers ask these questions today. Unfortunately, there are no quick or easy answers.1 However, to provide some guidance, TDWI has developed a data warehousing maturity model that you can use to benchmark your progress. The model provides a quick way for you to gauge where your data warehousing initiative is now and where it needs to go next.
Six Stages
The maturity model consists of six stages: prenatal, infant, child, teenager, adult and sage. Business value increases as the data warehouse moves through each successive stage. (See Figure 1.) The stages are defined by a number of characteristics, including scope, analytic structure, executive perceptions, types of analytics, stewardship, funding, technology platform, change management and administration (for which we borrow concepts from SEI's Capability Maturity Model). This article will address just a few of these characteristics. Organizations evolve at different rates through these six stages, and each may exhibit characteristics of multiple stages at a given time. As such, no one should expect to move cleanly and precisely from one stage to the next; however, there are two pivotal points in the evolution of any data warehouse/ business intelligence (DW/BI) initiative, represented in Figure 1 as the "gulf" and the "chasm." Many DW/BI initiatives stall at these points. They remain stuck with one foot in the past and another in the future, unable to make a clean leap beyond. As a result, they never fully reap the benefits in the successive stages. The primary way to overcome these obstacles is to change executive perceptions. To cross the gulf, executives must recognize that DW/ BI is more than just a management reporting system and that the spreadsheets and desktop databases they rely on to run the business are actually undermining productivity and...