Peer to Peer Magazine

22 F or a few years now a cross- functional team at Fenwick & West has been building an operational data store (ODS) – a single database that brings together the most useful data from our CRM, Finance, HR, intranet and other systems so that it can be more easily accessed for reporting and analysis throughout the firm. Our ODS has proven itself in three distinct and interrelated ways: increased awareness and use of available data, improved accuracy and consistency of data used in applications and analysis, and reduced time spent to gather data for analysis and reporting. Of data warehouses and operational data stores Before going on, however, it is helpful to distinguish between a data warehouse and an operational data store. A data warehouse generally stores transactional data (e.g. individual time entries with narratives), in addition to descriptive data (e.g. attorney name and practice group). Further, that data is restructured for rapid analysis and drill- down – to answer questions like "what has been the overall trend in patent prosecutions over the past five years and which specific patents did we prosecute in Q3 of 2016?" An operational data store, on the other hand, Better Decision Making with an Operational Data Store B Y M A R K G E R O W W I T H J O N M E T C A L F , O N U R T E Z I C , P A D M I N I G O R T Y, A N D T E J A P O D U R I has limited transactional data, but may feed data into a data warehouse to build such an historical record. Operational data stores generally answer more tactical questions such as "which attorneys have done work in the past year for software start-ups in the New York area?" Both can be queried by data analysts and decision makers to drive business decisions, but an ODS generally stores less data and fewer details about financial transactions. Early on we decided to focus on creating an ODS rather than a data warehouse, in order to reduce design complexity and shorten the time to delivery, and because we were (and

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