What goes into an information warehouse?

Recent articles dealing with the “information superhighway” and “information warehouse” have raised public awareness and interest in these topics, but they have contributed little toward answering a fundamental question: what kind of information do managers and workers use? For the Information Age, we need measures on the cost of creating, using and transporting information, as well as the cost of finding and fixing errors. We could also use some supplemental facts, such as the ratio of useful to extraneous information, the quantity of information created and destroyed annually, and the relative volume stored in paper, magnetic or optical form, or redundantly in multiple forms. Personnel, products and clients are the three areas that constitute the basic operating information that drives modern business. A hypothetical case study is presented that strongly suggests four topics in need of significant research to develop truly effective data-warehouse concepts and tools: (i) cross-references between domains, (ii) redundancy between paper and online storage, (iii) the ratio of graphics and images to alphanumeric or textual information, and (iv) effective metrics for normalizing information on data volumes and data quality