The data warehouse enables many companies to collect, store, integrate and analyze data rapidly. All major hardware companies and many software companies have announced plans for data warehouse support. As organizations work with data warehouses, they have discovered the usefulness of another structure, which the author of this work calls operational data stores. Operational data stores offer the promise at the operations level that the data warehouse offers at the strategic and managerial levels. The author identifies operational data stores and discusses why the operational data store concept is so crucial in relation to decision-making, data and executive systems data.