The need for improved business intelligence and data
warehousing accelerated in the 1990s. During this period, huge technological
changes occurred and competition increased as a result of free trade agreements,
globalization, computerization and networking.
In the early 1990, the Internet took the world by storm.
Companies rushed to develop eBusiness and eCommerce applications with hopes of
reducing their staffing needs and providing 24 hour service to customers. The
volume of application systems mushroomed during this period as a parallel set of
Internet applications was deployed. Back-end 'bridges' were built to try to
integrate the 'self service' application systems with the legacy 'full service'
applications. Unfortunately, integration was often messy and corporate data
remained fragmented or inconsistent.
As the demand for programmers increased and salaries
climbed, businesses looked for alternatives to custom built application
systems. In hopes of reducing costs and remaining competitive, companies
purchased software packages from third parties. These packages were designed
for generic business requirements and often did not integrate well with the
existing legacy systems.
By the end of the millennium, businesses discovered that
the number of application systems and databases had multiplied, that their
systems were poorly integrated and that their data was inconsistent across the
systems. More importantly, businesses discovered that they had lots of
fragmented data, but not the integrated information that was
required for critical decision making in a rapidly changing, competitive, global
economy.
Companies began building Data Warehouses to consolidate
data from disparate databases and to better support their strategic and tactical
decision making needs.
