Designing a Data Warehouse: Supporting Customer Relationship Management

Chapter 11. The Future

So what happens next? In data warehousing, we often use history to help us to try to predict future behavior. In most other respects, we don't tend to pay much attention to the past.

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have learned from it.

—Hegel (1830)

The whole world is currently engaged in an Internet roller-coaster ride. It is clear that the Internet will change everything. The only question is: By how much? The more developed part of the world is slowly but surely losing much of its manufacturing base to the emerging economies. The Internet, with its tendency toward globalization, is helping to facilitate ...