OPTION 1: DATA WAREHOUSING This option requires you to produce a research-based essay that critically discusses and recommends an appropriate data warehousing approach to satisfy the following scenario: Offco Ltd. is a large corporation that manufactures and sells a variety of office products. Recently, it has grown rapidly through acquisitions. The various business units of Offco operate in a relatively autonomous manner, having their own decision-support environments, as well as all the problems that typically attend decentralised operations e.g. multiple platforms, limited ability to share data from inconsistent data definitions, redundant staffing etc. The CEO of Offco plans to make key changes to the company’s operations, one of which is to present “a single face to customers.” Currently, the various business units are so autonomous that they each do not know what the others are doing with customers. This is where you come in. You have been hired to manage the introduction of a data warehousing environment that will allow Offco to be customer-focused, and support enterprise-wide decision-making activities regarding marketing, sales, and distribution across the company. You know that you will face significant organisational, business, and technical difficulties ahead. Besides having to identify a suitable strategy/approach for building an effective data warehousing capacity (i.e. that would cover such aspects as the organisation of people, processes/systems and associated activities/projects), you know that a critical difficulty lies also in getting the support of the various independent business units for this initiative. In the light of these circumstances, propose a general approach/framework (or ‘roadmap’) for creating a successful data warehousing environment in this company. Where relevant, your proposal should incorporate a discussion of: (i) various alternatives and their benefits/limitations (or advantages/disadvantages); (ii) why your recommended approach would be aligned with Offco’s operational context; as well as (iii) critical challenges associated with building an effective data warehousing capacity, and suggested ways to overcome such challenges. In particular, you should specify concrete steps/actions or structures for addressing how you can obtain the support of the CEO and business units, as well as deal with the cross-functional aspects of this initiative. It is expected you will answer these questions by drawing on academic/business literature and course materials, regarding approaches, challenges and critical success factors associated with developing data warehousing operations. In particular, your discussion and recommendations should be underpinned by ideas/findings from the academic (i.e. theoretical/research) literature, rather than from practitioner sources only. You may structure your paper in any way fit for meeting these requirements. If necessary, state any assumptions (if any) that underlie your discussion or recommendations. Your essay should be appropriately referenced i.e. you should cite references within the text in all instances of ideas/arguments obtained from other external sources (i.e. articles/books/websites etc), and have a bibliography list at the end of the essay.