Failure is in the eye of the beholder

Douglas Hackney, president of Enterprise Group Ltd., is quoted as saying "70% of all data warehouses are failures". While I think that is quite high (astronomical from my experience), one must look at the basis of what constitutes a data warehouse failure. Since Douglas has worked on many data warehouses, one could only dream about how many of them are failures.

Failures can be defined in many ways with different degrees of failure. Failure to me would mean that the data warehouse added NO value at all, or worse, lost value for the company. It would be pretty hard (although not impossible) to have this degree of failure. On the other hand, one could say that the failure of the data warehouse is where the original calculation of return of investment (ROI) was 15.03% and in fact we only calculated a dismal 14.92% ROI after the first year. To me, this is successful, just not as successful as we planned.

There are many reasons to think that data warehouses are not as successful as we would like them to be. These reasons include, but are not limited to (and are in no real order):

There are many reasons, most of them non-technical, for a data warehouse to succeed less than planned. Having a well defined methodology will help during the implementation, but an organization must understand that the

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data warehouse will change the way the company does business, and the users will need to change their habits (work flow) to use the data warehouse to its fullest extent. Without this change, I must concede the data warehouse may fail.

Can your data warehouse fail, but still produce a positive ROI? That will depend on your definition of failure. If the promise of the data warehouse is to increase the profitability by 1000%, and you only increased it by 100%, is that a failure with a positive ROI? What is your definition of failure?

About the Author:

Chuck Kelley is president and founder of Excellence In Data, Inc. and an internationally known expert in database technology. He has more than 20 years of experience in designing and implementing operational/production systems and data warehouses. Kelley has worked in some facet of the design and implementation phase of more than 35 data warehouses and data marts. He also teaches seminars, co-authored a book with W. H. Inmon on data warehousing and has been published in many trade magazines on database technology, data warehousing and enterprise data strategies. Please feel free to email him at chuckkelley@usa.net with comments (negative or positive) about this column or ideas for future columns.

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