Question

1. What was the business impact of The Globe and Mail’s data management problems?

2. What work had to be done by both business and technical staff to make sure that the data warehouse produced the results envisioned by management?

Answer 1

Q1. What was the business impact of The Globe and Mail’s data management problems?

The Globe and Mail was a large and thriving business, but both operational efficiency and management decision making were hampered by fragmented data stored in multiple systems that were difficult to access.

Business Impacts faced due to this problem are as mentioned below:

• Marketing campaigns took enormous time, i.e. it took weeks for a campaign to get executed.
• The marketing couldn’t reach to more appropriate and potential candidates, leading to inefficient investment on marketing.
• Customer satisfaction declined because of receiving irrelevant advertisements.

Q2. What work had to be done by both business and technical staff to make sure that the data warehouse produced the results envisioned by management?

Despite the obvious benefits of the new data warehouse, not all of The Globe and Mail’s employees immediately accepted the technology. People who were used to of extracting data from the mainframe system and manipulating it in their own local databases or file continued to do the same thing even after the data warehouse went live. They did not understand the concept of a data warehouse or the need to work towards enterprise-wide data management.

The Globe and Mail’s management decided to tackle this new problem by educating its employees, especially its marketing professionals, with the value of having all the organization’s data in a data warehouse and the tools available for accessing and analysing these data.