So the data warehouse now provides the fundamental feeds of information that's required to make the business decisions, and if somebody wants the view of what's happening right now you can go off into the operational system and get that information. Big Brother is watching you With greater competition and deregulation of some industries, consumers have less allegiance to any one provider. Customers in a particular geographic region are no longer tied to a particular electricity, gas or communications company. They will go with the company that gives them the service that best matches their needs. To give them the edge, companies analyse the transaction information to the full.
Data warehouses support two main types of analysis.
The first is the traditional, manual, top-down approach where a manager asks one question and asks his next question depending on the response he gets from the first. The analysis is used to support business decisions or to confirm business suspicions. The second type of analysis, sometimes known as data mining, is an automated approach where specialist software is let loose on the data to look for statistical relationships. But now a lot of the products put the drivers into a black box and give them a really easy to use interface. This includes Chi-squared analysis, linear regression and neural networking.