In my article “The Accidental Architecture,” I discussed how enterprises have evolved their data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) projects without a planned architecture. This evolution was the result of developing tactical projects while chasing the latest technology proclaimed by analysts, columnists and the vendors offering these solutions.
The random walk that created this accidental architecture may have solved some immediate, tactical needs, but the expenditure of time, resources and budget didn’t deliver ROI. Even worse, each new project resulted in a new stovepipe of data and technology that required increasing resources to integrate. It also made business users more likely to develop data shadow systems to perform their own integration.
