I hear large corporations admit they spent millions of dollars on data
integration projects such as data warehouses, data marts, enterprise
resource planning (ERP), and corporate performance management (CPM) in
the 1990s. However, their business users are still gathering data and
using spreadsheets for reporting and analysis. Smaller companies say
the software is too expensive and requires more IT resources than they
have.

The simple fact is that your business is making decisions every day
based on whatever information it has. To get that information, people
are bypassing the data warehouse and spending their time searching for
data, gathering, consolidating and reconciling it, and guessing that
it’s accurate.

Those data integration investments did not yield the
single version of the truth; they gave you many conflicting versions of
it. The issue isn’t that you can’t afford a data integration solution –
it’s that you can’t afford not do it the right way.