Building a data warehouse for a single source of truth
To be effective in garnering cutting-edge insights from data, it is crucial that organisations have a ‘single source of the truth’. A data warehouse can help supply this unified point of view.
The move to data-driven ways of working has been greatly heralded over the past decade. Using data insights, companies are said to take better commercial decisions. Data-driven ways of working also key support for operational improvements in processes, workflows, customer journeys and more.
But this is easier said than done – and in particular, data-driven working is still beholden to an age-old problem faced by any analysis. Garbage in, garbage out.
“If the data ain’t good, it’s all garbage,” says Oskar van den Berg, a consultant at Digital Power. “Organisations like to perform analytics and reporting on their data but struggle to get the insights that really add value because of technical shortcomings.”
These shortcomings can be due to all kinds of things. At the very core, sometimes they can’t even bring together their data. Getting data out of lagging ERP system is very complex, “interoperability with APIs and interfaces between all kinds of applications is a challenge”, and raw data sets are by no means unified, meaning “consolidations and analysis becomes impossible”. And even if organisations manage to get all data together, then often they find “they can’t even trust their data”, according to Van den Berg.
Data warehouse
It is here that a data warehouse really comes in handy. Also known as an enterprise data warehouse, it is a system used for reporting and data analysis – working as central repositories of integrated data from one or more disparate sources.
Considered a core component of business intelligence, Van den Berg refers to building a robust data warehouse as “the bedrock of data-driven working”. This is because it ensures that there are “no siloes within a business, and cross-functional data analyses can therefore be made”. Meanwhile, it also ensures that all data is aligned to a unified data model, so that data it can be compared accurately.
“One of the advantages of having a data warehouse is improved data quality,” he continues. “You can trust your data and make better data-driven decisions. A formalised data governance process helps ensure that the data always remain up to date.”
On top of this, data warehouses are also more efficient modes of storing data, helping save money in the long-run. Thanks to a reliable and future-proof technical infrastructure, less time is needed for development and maintenance in “areas that were previously very decentralised in their management.”
Implementing data warehouse
Of course, implementing a data warehouse comes with its own challenges – including knowing which cutting-edge business tools are needed to pull it off. Digital Power is a consulting firm which specialises in helping clients with such complex processes.
Founded in 2016, the firm can “build data warehouse solutions on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform of Amazon Web Services,” according to Van den Berg. Meanwhile, Digital Power also prepares its customers for life after their initial engagement.
He goes on, “After guiding our clients through the exploration and then IT strategy phase, we then help the IT-team design the actual data warehouse landscape. We shed light on the data insights an organisation aims for (management, business teams, back office, and so on) and then map these into the information flows needed to realise this.”
For example, another key element of the data warehouse set up process is “data cleansing and mapping”. In this process, Digital Power can help to ensure that all the data that comes into the warehouse is “aligned to a unified data model” – solving that initial hurdle of “garbage in, garbage out”.
Digital Power can also draw on a growing list of cases, to inform its future projects in the field. Earlier in 2024, for example, the firm announced on its website that it had helped Merlin – a digital music licensing partner representing 15% of the global recorded music market – to significantly reduce the operational burden on its analytics team, by consolidating all its data within a data warehouse. Because Merlin works with labels, distributors, and rightsholders around the world, it has a unique variety of data that is highly versatile and granular. The new platform provides Merlin with the opportunity to generate unique, previously unobtainable insights for its members.
In a busy 2023, meanwhile, Digital Power also confirmed it had helped Valk Exclusief – a chain of four-star hotels with 43 branches in the Netherlands – to personalise its guest-experience, both in the hotel and online. In that case, the firm had to transform the client’s data from an existing data warehouse, hosted in an SQL server, into a new Google BigQuery. The consultants transformed the data into the correct format to build Google BigQuery into a single source of truth for better analysis.
Earlier that same year, Digital Power assisted TM Forum, an alliance of over 850 global companies, to identify and solve data-related challenges. Pushing data to a data warehouse this time hosted in Snowflake, analysts at TM Forum were then able to work with the data and bring valuable insights to the company. Digital Power also worked to secure all data pipelines within Microsoft Azure, managed, and monitored via Data Factory – a tool which checks daily if all data is properly retrieved, transformed, and verified. This ensures that analysts have access to high-quality data in Snowflake and allows them to extract relevant insights.
