Your business wants to understand all the data it has. Simple… we’ll just put it all in a data warehouse, right? So, you find the right technology, setup flows to move the data into the warehouse…. and profit?
The reality is, it’s not about having all the data in one place. While data warehousing systems can help discover new insights, this isn’t Field of Dreams… we can’t build it and they will come. When the numbers from sales and finance don’t match, nobody trusts the warehouse & it becomes a noose around the business.
Data can be incredibly useful to a business, but it is critical that the data reflects what we think it does. If the definition of two similarly named pieces of data is different, we can’t use them interchangeably. Data wrangling is still necessary regardless of the tech stack used.
Data without definitions and alignment is simply a lot of random bits, increasing storage costs. While everyone gets excited about unstructured data and its potential for great insights, unstructured and undefined aren’t the same thing. Even structured data can be incorrectly defined… perhaps making it worse, since we expect the structure to have semantic meaning that matches other data with the same structure. Business users build a ton of reports, connecting disparate data sources to generate insights and make decisions. When the data doesn’t share the same meaning, businesses could spin their wheels, creating insights that aren’t based on reality and making decisions on those that could have a negative impact on the business.
Invest in not just storing the data, but understanding it.
https://goodstrat.com/2026/02/06/understanding-the-data-warehouse-dilemma-2026-02-07/
The Risks of Poor Data Alignment in Business
