Industry Data Warehouses

So what is an industry data warehouse? And why do we need them? Are they a threat to our confidential information and core competitive advantage? In very simple terms, industry data warehouses are created jointly by the firms in an industry group. They enable a better competitive environment by providing a common “score card” for participating firms. Now you know the rules, you can find out who is winning and who is losing and the game statistics. The competitive game gets even more riveting. Given the right "fit", while corporate data warehouses have the potential of providing a competitive advantage (please note the emphasis on "fit") to the owner, industry data warehouses create cooperative advantage (What about coopetition instead of competition?) for the users in the industry. Therefore, it becomes necessary that industry data warehouses provide common industry definitions of performance and market measurements, enable comparison of relevant parameters between a firm and the industry, ensure privacy of the data contributed by member firms, and have sufficient number of firms from the industry to guarantee reliability as well as confidentiality of the information. Industry data warehouses will have users who are data contributors as well as those who are non-data contributors. The data warehouse must fulfill the needs of both these groups of users by providing firm-only, comparison between the firm and rest-of-the-industry, benchmarking, and aggregate industry-only type of queries.

Industry data warehouses for benchmarking have become common place. More than a decade back, these were just emerging. If you are interested in learning more about industry data warehouses and how to build them, below is a link to an article that I had written in 1999. Enjoy in your copious free time!!

Link to the Article on Industry Data Warehouses

Note: This is a scanned copy of my article in PDF format available from Google docs.