There are many definitions that accurately identify the concept of Datawarehouse, in particular we can mention:

“A platform on which data from different areas of the organisation are stored and managed; this data is updated, integrated and consolidated by operational systems to support all decision support applications” (Gartner Group)

The Datawarehouse is a collection of data to support the decision-making process, through the Datawarehouse the management has the concrete opportunity to find the answers to all those questions that have a high impact on the company’s performance; those who hold decision-making roles must have the possibility to take advantage of all the tools to make the company’s leadership safe.

The typical problems of management with regard to the use of data can be summarised as follows:

° Lack of synthesis in reporting

° Different results from different sources for the same topic

° Inability to navigate data by reasoning with ‘business’ objects

° Unreliability of some critical data – High costs to synthesise reports and analyses° Poor “collaboration” or impossibility of communication of transactional information systems to query data° Lack of consistency between data

° Slowness in querying data not optimised for analysis