Tracking 3,500 stores with your hands tied

One major problem is that Sonic has more than 3,500 stores across the United States and 90 percent of them are franchised. When the corporation doesn’t own the stores, Miller explained, collecting the data it needs to make company-wide decisions becomes a very big challenge. Assuming the data arrives, the next challenge is disseminating from a big system in the corporate data center to various divisions, regional offices and employees in the field that need it.

Oh, and one more thing about EDWs: They tend to be a bit inflexible. If someone at Sonic wanted to look at some different data in order to get some new perspective or see a different aspect of the business, it could takes months — up to a year — to develop and distribute that report, Miller explained. That’s because it requires a lot of programming at every level — from the BI models, down to the database schema and even the tool that pulls data from the individual franchises.

via Sonic Drive-in CIO on learning to embrace big data and cloud computing.