Eric M Russell (4/7/2011)
The initital build of the datawarehouse typically stems from a request coming from uppermost management for an enterprise level report or dashboard that shows them X, Y, Z and the IT department just sort of figures out at some point (hopefully before the first deployment) that a datawarehouse of some type would be essential.Not unless they bring in an outside consultant, or at least one person on the project is up to speed on database architecture, would the initial phase of development ever involve a discussion of Kimball, Inmon, OLAP cubes, or even data replication.
Hi Eric,
I concur. I've seen customers purchase a reporting solution - usually an expensive one at that - and believe they have purchased a business intelligence solution. My guess is they spoke with a salesperson first, and then no one else after. If a business wants to implement a successful data warehouse, I believe they should speak to Data Warehouse or Business Intelligence Architect first. A good BI/DW architect is going to meet with the business people and the IT Department.
Magarity and Martin:
I mentioned Craig Utley in the article and his deference to "boiling the ocean." I agree with him and resist any attempts to increase the scope of Version 0. I've seen the larger projects fail many times. This Version 0 approach hasn't failed yet.
:{>
Andy Leonard, Chief Data Engineer, Enterprise Data & Analytics