Competency

Examine how a data warehouse is created and used to support reporting and dashboarding.

Instructions

You work for a tourism board at a top destination within the United States that among other tasks, sends information out to potential visitors, provides advertising for the destination, sells tickets to local events and parks, and helps drive economic growth by attracting visitors to the region. The market research team for your organization has decided to try and gather more insight into how their ticket sales are impacting the local economy and have asked for your assistance.

The IT team has all of the data from the cash registers to show what tickets have been purchased and when, and the website has also provided reports of sales of different products. The marketing team also has data regarding who has requested information packets to be mailed to them about the local area and then came to visit. Partnerships with several national travel agencies and popular travel booking websites have also provided some great information on shopping patterns, time of year for bookings, and much more.

The teams agree that a new data warehouse might be an option for bringing the information together, but the CEO is historically reluctant to spend money on something other than promoting the destination for fear it won’t generate value. Despite this, they are a big fan of graphs, factual data, and other bits of information around the destination.

Your boss has asked you to help contribute to the argument in favor of a data warehouse–as this is going to be discussed at an executive level, you feel a presentation and information packet is the best approach to get your message across.

The questions they are presenting you with include:

• What is a data warehouse, and why do we need it? What are the benefits of this technology?
• Why would a data warehouse be a lucrative investment for the tourism board?
• How would we go about implementing a data warehouse?
• What would a dashboard be useful for? What kind of information could it show that we don’t already have in separate databases?

The task:

Record a presentation using the screen sharing Webware/software of your choice (an Internet search will reveal many free options). Your presentation can be recorded with your own voiceover and visuals, just as you would if you were giving the presentation live.

Your presentation should outline the benefits of a data warehouse as opposed to only using separate databases in isolation. Show specific examples of how the separate sources of data available today could be brought together to gain insight, and discuss the benefits of an executive reporting dashboard.

Create a summary report to accompany your presentation as a takeaway for your executive management team.