Employee structure for a data warehousing/application/integration team

• Michael Lysons

  SSCertifiable

  Points: 6490

  More actions

  June 16, 2017 at 9:55 am

  #326691

  Firstly, I apologise if this is not the best forum for this post. I work in data warehousing and I am trying to "design" a structure for our department, so this seemed like a decent place to start.

  I am part of a two-person data warehouse (DW) team (a manager and a senior developer) at a hospital in the UK. As part of major project work over the last 2 years we are branching out from data warehousing to other data requirements, i.e. application development and integration in our case. As the DW manager my remit has grown from ETL to backup/restore, performance tuning, integration with other systems and so on. With the potential introduction of application development and the databases that will require, plus an even bigger push to integrate with other systems (HL7 and the like), the "data warehouse" team is no longer adequate to support it.

  I was thinking that we should re-structure around the concept of a Data Services team, which would be the big umbrella under which all data-related stuff sits. One person would be the Data Services manager, who would set the strategy for all data related things, liase with the top execs etc. They would have 3 teams underneath which would probably be Applications, Integration, and Data Warehouse. I'd envisage one manager/team lead for each team, with one extra person per team. However, this still leaves us without a dedicated DBA, something which I would like to have. Should each manager be the DBA for their team? Should there be a "DBA Team" that looks after backup/restore, patching, server builds etc? My feeling is that a DBA Team would be best, so as to centralise all that sort of work, and to free up the other teams from working on it.

  I would really appreciate your advice and input on this, so that I have a better chance of creating a structure that's fit for purpose. I appreciate the above is vague in terms of size of databases and server infrastructure and work load etc, but at this point I am interested in hearing how people are structured in their workplaces where the data requirements span multiple disciplines. I'd love to know what you think works well and what doesn't.

  Thank you.