Build it and they will come. No they won’t.

Build with specific purpose, fully engaged with key stakeholders along the way, and they will come.

I’ve seen too many enterprise wide data warehouses being built, at huge expense, only to see them fall into disuse. The use of data in a business is not prescriptive.

If you want your business to become truly data-led you need to build with purpose, starting small and designing to scale. You need to generate truly actionable insights – insights that drive change, aligned with your business goals.

The human-centred, design thinking ethos is what I have followed my entire career. This has enabled me to design, build and manage successful data warehouses across many different industries, including healthcare, insurance, energy and transportation.

I am fairly agnostic of the many different technology platforms available today – I have used many of them. Choosing the right tools to do the job is important, but the fundamentals of good data management have remained unchanged since Ralph Kimball wrote the Data Warehouse Toolkit in 1996.