This is a guest post by Bill Inmon, an American computer scientist. Many industry leaders recognize him as the father of the data warehouse. Inmon authored the first book, held the first conference, and wrote the first magazine column on data warehousing. He currently focuses on developing the revolutionary technology known as textual ETL.

Digital industries have come a long way in recognizing the value of their customers' data for making well-informed and timely decisions. Businesses invest a lot in implementing innovative strategies, but they also need some metrics to observe the effectiveness or success of those strategies to drive future decisions. Like any other industry, metrics in the e-commerce industry are quantifiable measures of an online business's performance.

Here are five things to know about ETL and how it benefits your Ecommerce business: Think about all the data that exists in your Ecommerce business. That might include customer data, inventory data, sales data, advertising data, and social media data. Now think about all the software and systems that store that data. These might include transactional databases, relational databases, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and SaaS tools.

In the beginning, simple systems collected data, wrote data to files, and created reports. For the most part, these systems operated on transaction-based data—bank deposits, sales, telephone calls, and the like. An entire infrastructure supported these essential business systems, but there was little or no place for text. All data was highly and tightly structured, and text was ignored.

Five things you need to know about how to enrich data ETL: All business decisions happen based on the data that’s available. It makes sense, then, that the more detailed that data is, the more effective those business decisions can be. That’s where data enrichment comes in. When e-commerce companies enrich data, they can improve data analysis and business intelligence and make smarter, more informed decisions.

Digitalization has significantly accelerated ever since the 2019 pandemic. Fortunately, Ecommerce is a flexible industry that is capable of constantly evolving with changing digital trends and global developments. Customers today use multiple devices like smartphones, laptops, and desktops, and employ all these channels to gather product information. Ecommerce businesses offer omnichannel shopping for these customers to seamlessly shop between all these devices, with multiple payment options.

Our six key points on data pipelines include: Whether you’re a one-person show reselling items on an online marketplace or a large Ecommerce enterprise with hundreds of employees, these businesses share a common factor: both generate data. The size of your business can influence the amount of data you generate, sure. But any amount of data — if it’s not adequately accessible — is worthless. Every business, especially an Ecommerce business, needs a data pipeline.

This is a guest post by computer scientist Bill Inmon, recognized as the "father of the data warehouse." Bill has written 65 books in nine languages and is currently building a technology called textual ETL. Many years ago, there were no data warehouses. Most Ecommerce retailers relied on legacy systems with unintegrated data that couldn’t communicate with each other, resulting in data silos. Comparing data sets from these systems was almost impossible.

With so many moving parts involved in crafting a modern customer experience, the need for a customer data platform (CDP) is unavoidable. A CDP platform can help ease the woes of customer data management by helping your business collect data and use it in real-time to help your marketing team reshape the customer journey.

The digital transformation of today’s data industry is a result of the dramatic increase in data generation and consumption worldwide. The only way for organizations to keep up with the continuously growing and changing data is to prioritize data as an asset. Today, organizations are beginning to recognize the potential of their business data and are working on fostering a culture that prioritizes data and leverages it to drive their decision-making. But putting data first is not enough.