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.
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.