eople can put SO much effort into developing these types of systems and still be stuck in a customer information desert? There are several reasons. Know What You Are Trying to Build The first problem that most developers of these telecommunication data warehouses experience is that they have no idea how the warehouse will be used. They set out to build the systems with the best intentions but quickly get lost in the morass of confusion, contradiction, and irreconcilable differences that define the relationships between different telco customer touchpoint organizations. Since the computer systems developers must rely on the business people to tell them what they need the system to do, and since the business people don't know, the resultant system is a nightmare of contradiction and confusion. Salvage Operations through Scope Reduction At this point there are two ways to go, either continue building the large, amorphous, unfocused master warehouse that no one will find useful, or reduce the scope of the system to the point where you can actually deliver something of value. Those who take the first option end up with multi-million-dollar data junkyards. These systems hold much information that nobody cares about and no one can make use of. Option two proponents create smaller, focused, highly effective data marts that deliver great value to the groups that use them. A Data Warehouse Cannot Repair a Bro- ken Business Process The sad truth about misdirected data warehouse efforts is that, no matter how hard we try, we cannot get a data warehouse to fix a broken business process. Data warehouses cannot change how Chapter 10 business organizations operate. They cannot change how groups cooperate. They cannot dictate policy. They can only reflect those things. A Single View of the Customer Is Not Enough We said that the first thing we need this warehouse to do is help us create a single view of customer, which ensures that everyone treats the same customers in the same way. If we can collect all the information about cus