The end of the Central DWH Era?

Dear Central DWH, Our Love is Over…

A few years ago, it was perfect.

We centralized everything. Clean architecture. Clear ownership. One source of truth. The business was happy. IT was in control. Love was in the air.

Then the kids arrived.

Spreadsheets. Everywhere. Unstable, unsupervised, uncontrolled:

• Because waiting for the central data warehouse took too long.
• Because the business needed answers today, not next quarter.
• Because context got lost somewhere between the ticket and the pipeline.

Now we’re co-parenting in chaos:

• IT maintains the perfect infrastructure nobody uses.
• Business builds shadow systems they can actually work with.
• Both sides frustrated.
• Both sides right.

Here’s what we learned:

• Centralization promised us control.
• It delivered bottlenecks.

The relationship didn’t fail because of bad intentions.
It failed because structure created distance instead of connection.

The path forward isn’t divorce or reconciliation. It’s federated governance.

Centralized standards + Local ownership = Data that actually serves the business.

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