Information processing and enabling technology in a Canadian financial services company: a study of data warehousing

A data warehouse is fundamentally different from legacy application operational systems in terms of the class of data it contains, the type of processing it supports, and the design criteria it uses. As a repository of integrated information, from autonomous, distributed and heterogeneous sources, a data warehouse supports analytical processing by enabling data pattern analysis of historical information across different aggregation levels. Research into data warehousing is lagging behind industry enthusiasm for the subject and as such this emerging field of study affords researchers many exciting opportunities to tackle complex business, technical, financial and organizational issues. The purpose of this exploratory study was to develop a deeper understanding of the impact of a specific organizational change on information processing requirements and the potential of data warehousing as an enabling technology to deliver information processing capability