The document discusses common issues companies face when trying to meet business reporting needs from their data. It notes that companies often end up with thousands of reports due to: 1) Building reports directly from transactional data sources rather than consolidating data into a data warehouse optimized for analysis and reporting. 2) Creating denormalized tables within the data warehouse for each individual report, leading to inconsistent, hard to manage data. 3) Resolving this by building separate data marts with a dimensional model, but this still resulted in fragmented, redundant data structures. The ideal approach would have been to design a single centralized data warehouse from the start using a dimensional model to provide a consistent, integrated view of