An empirical investigation of the effects of data warehousing on decision performance

Organizations implement data warehouses to overcome the limitations of DSS by adding this database component and thereby improve decision performance. However, no empirical evidence is available to show the effects of a data warehouse (DW) on decision quality and performance. To examine this, a laboratory experiment was conducted. The data warehouse variables considered were the time horizon of the data and its level of aggregation. It was found that using a full data warehouse resulted in significantly better performance and that using it resulted in better performance than using a partial data warehouse (long-time history with no aggregated data). However, using a partial data warehouse was not significantly better than not using a data warehouse at all.