From a data management perspective, the last decade primarily has been about gathering data from the various enterprise applications used to run a business and consolidating the information, often in a data warehouse. Enterprises have made significant investments in extracting and cleansing their data in order to make it consistent. Business intelligence (BI) tools were installed and are being used to automate reporting and data analysis that previously was done by the enterprise applications themselves or in spreadsheets and other “data shadow systems.”

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