Corporate Information Factory

What Does Corporate Information Factory Mean?

A corporate information factory (CIF) is a logical architecture created and promoted by a small group of data professionals. This type of architecture relies on a data warehouse linked to assorted other pieces that provide for various functions that help a business to use data and optimize its use of valuable internal resources.

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Techopedia Explains Corporate Information Factory

One of the features often linked to the data warehouse is a decision support system. In general, DSS technologies simply aid human decision makers in using data to make decisions. This can happen in many ways, but key industry conventions have led to a common view of how human managers are supported by these technologies.

Other structures in CIF include data marts for manipulating captured data, data delivery systems, and other operational systems geared toward specific aspects of operations, such as customer or vendor relationships. CIF uses the principles of integration and transformation to provide key functionality and results. This architecture also uses metadata principles to allow for easier retrieval and identification of data pieces.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…