Bill Inmon is known as the “father of data warehousing." Inmon coined the term “data warehouse," wrote the first book about data warehousing (“Building the Data Warehouse”), co-sponsored the first conference about data warehousing with Arnie Barnett, was the first data warehouse magazine columnist, and was the first person to offer classes about data warehousing.

Inmon is a prolific thinker and author; he created the concepts of the Corporate Information Factory, the Government Information Factory, and Data Warehousing 2.0 and wrote about how to build, use, and maintain each. In July 2007, Computerworld named Inmon to the list of the ten most influential people of the early years of the computer industry.