As Business Intelligence is becoming mature and more of a commodity, there is pressure to achieve things in a faster & cheaper way. In terms of data warehouses & business intelligence this means automation. For example, on a daily basis, we are building & populating fact tables or adding slowly changing dimensions type II functionality to dimensions over and over again.
By intelligently using the right metadata, it is possible to generate these objects and their corresponding ETL in a more time-effective manner. Next to the ETL automation, potentially the automation, based on similar metadata, can be achieved for cube generation, semantic layer generation and report generation. This concept is called "Data warehouse automation".
Ideally the same metadata can be used and shared among multiple vendor tools. The required metadata can be stored in a metadata data store or simply in an XML file. With this approach, the development time will be reduced, the number of errors will be reduced, the overall maintenance will go down and the learning curve for developers will be shortened.