Beyond data warehousing

During the last ten years the approach to business management has deeply changed, and companies have understood the importance of enforcing achievement of the goals defined by their strategy through metrics-driven management. The DW process, though supporting bottom-up extraction of information from data, fails in top-down enforcing the company strategy. A new approach to BI, called Business Performance Management (BPM), is emerging from this framework: it includes DW but it also requires a reactive component capable of monitoring the time-critical operational processes to allow tactical and operational decision-makers to tune their actions according to the company strategy. The aim of this paper is to encourage the research community to acknowledge the coming of a second era in BI, to propose a general architecture for BPM, and to lay the premises for investigating the most challenging of the related issues.