You are about to face an investor firing squad. As an executive suit in global conglomerate ExCo, your major shareholders have called an urgent meeting to quiz you on the current state of business. How are your recent acquisitions in Guatemala performing? When will ExCo finally be compliant with the latest corporate governance code? And how on earth do you expect to derive any shareholder value from that merger in Central America?

If you had even half the answers at your fingertips, this might be survivable. But your data warehouse (the IT system which collects data for analysis and reporting) hasn’t taken into account your new acquisition. Oh, and you’re told that you can’t access any data from this acquisition until next quarter. It’s times like these when it seems that your IT and your business live in completely different worlds.

As scenarios go, this one is not so far-fetched. Big business is a fast-moving and constantly changing environment. Competition and innovation bring new opportunities and threats, while new regulations and legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II heighten demand for transparency and compliance.

Given these pressures, it is hardly surprising that IT is often out of sync with the needs of the organizations it serves. The lack of the right tools to enable constantly up-to-date reporting can become a stumbling block hampering a business’s ability to cope with demands put upon it; and investors are not known for their patience.

Is there a better way to harness the power of IT to bring it in closer alignment with your business? You bet. It’s called Data Warehouse Lifecycle Management (DWLM). This rather technical nomenclature may imply as much excitement to a busy company director as filling in a tax return on a wet Sunday afternoon, but in fact it is providing a truly ‘eureka moment’ for those executives now discovering its potential.

DWLM is a discipline for managing the data warehouse throughout its lifetime, and ensuring that it continuously provides business executives with fast, up-to-the-minute, consolidated management information. This approach is designed around automating the creation and modification of data warehouses, which in the past have traditionally been rigid in structure and thus inflexible to change.