In a world of tremendous growth in technology and competence, decision makers in all kind of

organizations realize that in order to keep their organizations in the competence circle .they need
to have powerful supportive systems that allow them to take accurate decisions in a short time.
Thus the need for DSS and has been increased and Data Warehouses become the key principle
behind the success of organizations.
Data Warehouse can be defined as a subject-oriented, integrated, non-volatile, and time variant,
non-updatable collection of data to support management decision-making processes and business
intelligence.
o Subject-oriented: Data are grouped by subjects.
o Integrated: Data are stored in a globally consistent format. This implies cleansing the
data so that data have consistent naming conventions and physical attribute
o Time-Variant: Data captured are for long-term use often 510 years
o Non-volatile: Once data at a particular time are captured and stored, their attributes are
preserved
This leads us to define the Business Intelligence which involves knowledge discovery and
inferences by analyzing the data stored in DW to acquire valuable information.
Generally speaking, the key role of the data warehouse is to provide compelling business
intelligence to the decision-maker facilitating an understanding of business problems,
opportunities, and performance. It must incorporate internal and external knowledge acquired
over time and adapt it to current business conditions.
Data warehouses are not intended to assist day-to-day operations only (unlike Operational Data
Store) but it extends to support the decision makers to take the strategic decisions.
Benefits of implementing Data warehouses:
1- Time Saving for the data suppliers and the users of the data since all the needed data can
be extracted from one accurate source
2- More and better information since DW solved the problems associated to their
independently legacy systems which often contains inaccurate, duplicate and dissimilar
data about the same entity.
3- Better decisions can be made by providing the decision makers with suitable information
which is fundamentally different from the type of information used in day-to-day
information
4- Support for the accomplishment of strategic business objectives through analyzing
historical, current and future data.
5- Facilitate business process re-engineering at business organizations.
Several empirical evidences are listed and all proves that implementing DW to support DSS
systems results in significantly better performance by providing more reliable and consistent data
for business decision-making.
Types of data needed for decision makers

Foundational information includes traditional accounting and financial measurements

such as cashflow and liquidity projections and ratios.
Productivity information describes the effectiveness and efficiency of organizational
production processes including knowledge-based and servicebased processes and the
opportunity costs associated with management decisions.
Competence information describes the core competencies that enable a business to
succeed. These are unique abilities that differentiate a business from its competitors and
form the basis from which competitive advantage can be gained.
Resource-allocation information deals with the effective and efficient use of scarce
organizational resources.
Environmental information: information about markets, customers, and non-customers;
about technology in ones own industry and others; about world-wide finance; and about the
changing world economy.

Data warehousing architecture

1- Content management: to provide the
types of data described above for
decision makers, we need to Extract,
Transform and load information generated
from daily operations from diverse
operational ISs and external sources.
2- Integration and Design: determination,
representation, and conceptual
integration of the data that are relevant
to the managerial decision-making in an
organization.
3- Use: the modes of dissemination of
information to the end user; the
development, selection, and
implementation of appropriate models,
analytic tools, and data mining tools; the privacy and security of data; system
performance; and adequate levels of training and support.
4- Evolution: data warehouse must be designed for change from the beginning

Issues and Challenges of DWs developments/Implementation:

FEATURES TO CONSIDER IN A DATA WAREHOUSING SYSTEM:

The discussion here is about the technical specification of the analytical tool (online analytical
processing tools (OLAP)) that should be used with the data warehouse to satisfy the End user
and so to get the maximum utilization from this investment. The acceptance of Data warehouse
and OLAP by End users can be measured by:
Perceived ease of use (PEU): the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system
would be free of effort.
Perceived usefulness (PU): the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system
would enhance his job performance
Two types of OLAP were introduced and examined here (MOLAP and ROLAP) and the result of
the research was that MOLAP tools make the data warehouse system easy to use

but not useful; ROLAP tools make the data warehouse useful but not easy to
use.
The main idea here is that organizations should believe that how users perceive
data warehouses is a major factor for the success of this tool, huge investments
are paid to implement data warehouse and its analytical tools but it will be failed
if end user perception was not taken into consideration in terms of PEU and PU