MODULE 4 • GOALS & OBJECTIVES

Planning your Data Warehouse • KEY ISSUES & OPTIONS

Key Issues • VALUES & EXPECTATIONS
• Value and Expectations • JUSTIFICATION
• Risk Assessment • EXECUTIVE SPONSORSHIP
• Top-Down or Bottom-Up Approach • IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY
• Build or Buy • TENTATIVE SCHEDULE
• Single Vendor or Best-of-Breed • PROJECT AUTHORIZATION
Single Vendor and Best-of-breed THE DATA WAREHOUSE PROJECT
Choosing a single vendor solution has a few Assessment of Readiness
advantages:
The readiness assessment report is expected to serve the
• High level of integration among the tools following purposes:
• Constant look and feel • Lower the risks of big surprises occurring during
implementation
• Seamless cooperation among components
• Provide a proactive approach to problem resolution
• Centrally managed information exchange
• Reassess corporate commitment
• Negotiable overall price
• Review and reidentify project scope and size
Major advantages of the best-of-breed:
• Identify critical success factors
• You can build an environment to fit your organization.
• There is no need to compromise between database and • Restate user expectations
support tools.
• Ascertain training needs
• You can select products best suited for the specific
function. The Life-Cycle Approach

“Data Warehouse is Business Requirements, Not

Technology”
-Let business requirements drive your data warehouse,
not technology.
Top Management Support “The project must have
the full support of the top management right from
day one”
-Make sure you have a sponsor from the highest levels
of management to keep the focus. The data warehouse
must often satisfy conflicting requirements. The sponsor
must wield his or her influence to arbitrate and to
mediate.
Justifying Your Data Warehouse
The Seven Phases of the SDLC
Here are some sample approaches for preparing the
justification: •Planning.

• Calculate the current technology costs to produce the •Requirements.

applications and reports supporting strategic decision
•Design and prototyping.
making.
•Software development.
• Calculate the business value of the proposed data
warehouse with the estimated dollar values for profits, •Testing.
dividends, earnings growth, revenue growth, and market
share growth. •Deployment.

• Do the full-fledged exercise. •Operations and maintenance.

The Overall Plan

Overall plan for data warehousing initiative
• INTRODUCTION
• MISSION STATEMENT
• SCOPE
The Development Phases
assume to participate in the development:
Information delivery is a form of reporting that
involves scheduling and sharing data in a formatted and
interactive manner.
Adopting Agile Development
The Agile methodology is a way to manage a project by
breaking it up into several phases. It involves constant
collaboration with stakeholders and continuous
improvement at every stage. Once the work begins,
teams cycle through a process of planning, executing,
and evaluating.
The four core values of agile software development as
stated by the Agile Manifesto are:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools; •
working software over comprehensive documentation;
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and.
• responding to change over following a plan.
The Project Team
User Participation
Here is a list of a few team roles that users can
 Project sponsor—responsible for supporting
the project effort all the way (must be an
executive)
 User department liaison representatives—
help IT to coordinate meetings and review
sessions and ensure active participation by the
user departments 18
 Subject area experts—provide guidance in the
requirements of the users in specific subject
areas and clarify semantic meanings of business
terms used in the enterprise
 Data review specialists—review the data
models prepared by IT; confirm the data
elements and data relationships
 Information delivery consultants—examine
and test information delivery tools; assist in the
tool selection
 User support technicians—act as the first-
level, front-line support for the users in their
respective departments
Anatomy of a Successful Project
Key success factors for a data warehouse project.
• Ensure continued, long-term, committed support
from the executive sponsors.
• Up front, establish well-defined, real, and agreed
business value from your data warehouse. Manage
user expectations realistically.
• Get the users enthusiastically involved throughout
the project.
• The data extraction, transformation, and loading
(ETL) function is the most time consuming, labor-
intensive activity. Do not under-estimate the time
and effort for this activity.
• Remember architecture first, then technology, then
tools. Select an architecture that is right for your
environment.
• The right query and information tools for the users
are extremely critical. Select the most useful and
easy-to-use ones, not the glamorous. Avoid bleeding
edge technology.
• Plan for growth and evolution. Be mindful of
performance considerations.
• Assign a user-oriented project manager.
• Focus the design on queries, not transactions.
• Define proper data sources. Only load the data that
is needed.
MODULE 5
Information from the data warehouse
If the kinds of strategic information made available
in data warehouse were readily available from the
source systems, then we would not really need the
warehouse. Data warehousing enables the users to
make better strategic decisions by obtaining data
from the source systems and keeping it in a format
suitable for querying and analysis.
Data Warehouse versus Operational Systems
The difference relates to two aspects of the information
contained in these databases. First, they differ in the
usage of the information. Next, they differ in the value
of the information.
Information Potential
We cannot treat information delivery in a special way
unless we fully realize the significance of how the data
warehouse plays a key role in the overall management of
an enterprise.
Information potential for business areas
We considered one isolated example of how the
information potential of your data warehouse can assist
in the planning for market expansion and in the
assessment of the results of the execution of marketing
campaigns for that purpose.
General areas of the enterprise where the data warehouse
can assist in the planning and assessment phases of the
management loop:
• Profitability Growth
• Strategic Marketing
• Customer Relationship Management
• Corporate Purchasing
• Realizing the Information Potential
Stages in realization of the information potential
1. Think through the business need and define it in terms
of business rules as applicable to data in the data
warehouse.
2. Harvest or select the appropriate subset of the data
according to the stipulated business rules.
3. Enrich the selected subset with calculations such as
totals or averages. Apply transformations to translate
codes to business terms.
4. Use metadata to associate the selected data with its
business meaning.
5. Structure the result in a format useful to the users.
6. Present the structured information in a variety of
ways, including tables, texts, graphs, and charts.
USER INFORMATION INTERFACE
In order to pass through the six stages and
realize the information potential of the data warehouse,
you have to build a solid interface for information
delivery to the users. The interface logically sits in the
middle, enabling information delivery to the users.
The interface could be a specific set of tools and
procedures, tailored for your environment. At this point,
we are not discussing the exact composition of the
interface; we just want to specify its features and
characteristics. Without getting into the details of the
types of users and their specific information needs, let us
define the general characteristics of the user–
information interface.
Information Usage Modes
When you consider all the various ways the data
warehouse may be used, you note that all the usage
comes down to two basic modes or ways.
1. Verification Mode
2. Discovery Mode
Approaches for the interaction
1. Informational Approach
2. Analytical Approach
3. Data Mining Approach
USER INFORMATION INTERFACE HAS THE
FOLLOWING CHARACTERISTICS
1. Preprocessed Information
2. Predefined Queries and Reports
3. Ad hoc Constructions
Industry Applications
Sample of industry sectors
1. Manufacturing
2. Retail and Consumer Goods
3. Banking and Finance
Classes of users
Casual or Novice User-Uses the data warehouse
occasionally, not daily
Regular User-Uses the data warehouse almost daily.
Power User-Is highly proficient with technology.
Classes of Data Warehouse Users
Tourist
Dashboards and Scorecards
Organizations have seriously begun to deploy
dashboards and scorecards as their preferred mode of
delivering business intelligence.

 A dashboard helps you visualize large sets of

data and showcase your company's progress on a
project or goal.
 A scorecard helps you align your strategy with
your objectives and highlights how your
organization is working towards your strategy