Efficiency Evaluation of Data Warehouse Operations

We present an efficiency model for data warehouse operations and analyze a data set to evaluate the model. The model contains salient variables to evaluate the efficiency of an organization's data warehouse operations for refresh processing and query production. The variables in the model include resource consumption (labor usage and computing budgets), system usage measures (users and queries), quality measures (data age and availability), and a size measure (change data amount). We report on the evaluation of a data set collected from USA and non USA-based (mostly Korean) organizations using input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis. The analysis indicates wide dispersions in reported data, large differences in labor budgets between efficient and inefficient firms, few organizations efficient in both refresh processing and query production, and the difficulty of providing some data (computing budgets and flexibility ratio). Follow-up interviews with selected organizations provided insights about the value of efficiency comparisons of information technology organizations and suggestions to improve the model