Data Warehousing, Vital Tool for R&D Management
ACTION ITEMS

If you run an R&D operation, chances are you're drowning in data. Data warehousing can systematically conserve corporate knowledge, and integrate business, technology, client and regulatory data for efficient retrieval by decision support systems and executive information systems.

"If knowledge is an organization's main asset," says Peter Katz, Technical Insights' Publisher, "and managing it a key to leadership, then data warehousing is a major strategic approach to success."

New technology has made data warehousing affordable, but raises new challenges for both industry and government. Successful data warehousing depends on the quality of the data being stored. As regulatory agencies move from paper to electronic submissions, they are working with industry to develop common standards for data quality, system reliability, data validation and auditability.

"Data Warehousing: Regulatory and Market Intelligence for R&D Organizations", a new report from Technical Insights, is a state-of-the-art progress report on the technology, and on regulatory initiatives by scores of federal and international agencies. It charts the steps to be followed in building a data warehouse, from designing a data warehouse that best meets the needs of an organization, all the way to managing and manipulating the data it holds.

Among the key features:

• An overview of the evolution of data management tools
• Practical guidance on developing a balanced data warehouse
• Choosing a data warehouse model
• Layered architectures
• The advantages of online analytical processing (OLAP)
• How data warehouse design differs from the design of traditional operational systems
• The role of the World Wide Web in making data warehouses available globally at lower costs
• The latest advances in data collection devices that link the research lab to marketing and R&D.

Finally, the report offers a complete "Who's Who" of data warehousing, with listings of Internet resources and contact information for the federal and international regulatory agencies and private organizations involved in standards development and enterprise automation.

Additional contacts and resources in this market include: NASA/Gooddard Space Flight Center, Data Warehousing Institute, Collaborative Electronic Notebooks Consortium, American National Standards Institute, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, National Standards System Network, Defense Standardization Bodies, Department of Energy (DOE) Technical Standards Program, U.S. Pharmacopeia, American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, AAPS.

For more information, see http://www.wiley.com/technical_insights