Planning for Your Data Warehouse: Key Issues
Bad planning and improper project management practice is the main factor in Data Warehouse project failures. First of all, make sure that your company really needs data warehouse for their business support. Then, prepare criteria for assessing the value expected from data warehouse. Decide the software on this project and make sure where the data warehouse will collects its data sources. You need to make rules on who will be using the data and who will operate the new systems. Next we will elaborate one by one this step in planning your data warehouse for your company.
Important Key Issues How to make sure that the company is really needs the data warehouse? The best way to find out is by answers the important key issues in planning your data warehouse. Following items is the key questions in prepare your data warehouse importance.
1. Value and Expectations.
Will your data warehouse help the management to do better planning? Will this system help them make the right decisions? How much this system could increase the company market share? What is management expectation with this data warehouse?, all these questions is the starting point to valuate your project planning.
Those all questions is the end to end guidelines in the all project phase. Whenever the project face the difficulties and required the best solution, just simply go back to those primary questions.
2. Risk Assessment.
Assessment of risks in IT project is more than calculating the loss from the project costs. We should also consider the risk for the company if they not implemented the system, how many opportunities will be missed by the company? What possible impact if the project is not finished by the plan for the company business plan? All of these need to include in your assessment of risk, besides also the loss of the project costs.
3. Top-down or Bottom-up. Top-down approach starts at the enterprise-wide data warehouse. Data from the large enterprise-wide process by data warehouse and used in the departmental and subject data marts. Bottom-up approach starts from individual data marts to make the enterprise data warehouse.
The two approach that will be taken in your company data warehouse need to consider this following things: – Do you have enough resources, time and budget to build a corporate-wide data warehouse? But may advantages from the fully unified data warehouse. – Or your company need to prove the data warehouse usefulness by implementing small amount of data marts and continues to another data marts.
4. Build or Buy. In a data warehouse, there is a large range of functions, such as: Data extraction, Data transformation and loading data from storage. You have to decide are you going to buy all these function from vendor or making some function customize with your own company business needs.
5. Single Vendor or Best-of-Breed.
Choosing a single vendor solution has a few advantages: – High level of integration among the tools – Constant look and feel – Seamless cooperation among components – Centrally managed information exchange – Overall price negotiable
Advantages on choosing the best-of-breed vendor selection: – Could build an environment to fit your organization – No need to compromise between database and support tools – Select products best suited for the function
Next, we will discuss on how to create the business requirements for you data warehouse projects.
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