Enterprise software systems are designed as transaction processing tools and today the main job is to optimize an informed decision making process for users at all levels of the organizational hierarchy. Recent trends seem to indicate that access to key operational data is no longer the purview of executives alone. Many executives of manufacturing and service companies today are allowing (and even encouraging) low level managers, supervisors and analysts on the shop floor and in distribution centers access to operational performance data to enable better and more timely decision making by those employees.
You’re familiar with the information systems that support your transactions such as ATM withdrawals, bank deposits and cash register scans at the grocery store. The transaction processing systems involved with these transactions constantly handle updates to what we might call operational databases. For example, an ATM withdrawal transaction needs to reduce the bank balance accordingly a bank deposit adds to an account and a grocery store purchase is likely reflected an appropriate reduction in the store’s inventory for the items we bought.
These online transaction processing (OLTP) systems handle a company’s ongoing business. In contrast a data warehouse is typically a distinct system that provides storage for data that will be made use of in analysis.
The intent of that analysis to give management the ability to scour data for information about the business and it can be used to provide tactical decision support whereby. For example, line personnel can make quicker and or more informed decisions.
Most operational data in enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and in their complementing siblings such as supply chain management (SCM) or customer relationship management (CRM) are stored in what is referred to as OLTP systems, which are computing processing systems in which the computer responds immediately to user requests.
Each request is considered to be a transaction which is a computerized record of a discrete event such as the receipt of inventory or a customer order. In other words a transaction requires a set of two or more database updates that must be completed in an all or nothing fashion.
In the 1980s many business users referred to their mainframes as the black hole because information went into it but none ever come back out. All requests for reports had to be programmed by IT staff and only canned reports could be generated on a scheduled.