Chapter 11. The Future

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So what happens next ? In data warehousing, we often use history to help us to try to predict future behavior. In most other respects, we don't tend to pay much attention to the past.

What experience and history teach is this ”that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have learned from it.

”Hegel (1830)

The whole world is currently engaged in an Internet roller -coaster ride. It is clear that the Internet will change everything. The only question is: By how much? The more developed part of the world is slowly but surely losing much of its manufacturing base to the emerging economies. The Internet, with its tendency toward globalization, is helping to facilitate this migration. The developed world is now becoming more service oriented than manufacturing. The entrepreneurs have already realized that products in themselves are not any more sufficient to satisfy the customers' needs. It is the products plus the value- added services that are needed in the more sophisticated economies. Those who are stuck in the old regime of manufacturing only will find themselves competing in a market that increasingly, they cannot survive in.

Part of our job is to help our customers to visualize the future in terms of their IT systems. This book has been about the designing and building of data warehouses for use in a CRM environment. CRM is one of the value-added services that sophisticated consumers have come to expect. The question is, Just what does the future hold in this area? With the Internet changing everything, we might think that it's impossible to predict. However, if we keep focused on the data warehouse, the underlying data architecture may not have to change at all. Sure, the interfaces will continue to evolve . We can already access the data warehouse using our mobile phone, and Internet-enabled wrist watches will soon be here. However, the fundamental information structure need not change all that much. OK, the physical implementation will almost certainly change. The Internet will facilitate the emergence of vast data centers consisting of hundreds of thousands or even a million linked servers operated by service providers that will enable outsourcing on a scale hitherto unimagined. But the data need not change all that much; our GCM still describes the kind of information that we need to store in order to understand our customers.

There are some things that are worth highlighting, and the rest of this chapter attempts a certain amount of crystal-ball gazing.

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