Receiving Value From Your Data Warehouse Investment
A Data Warehouse can be defined as a centralized container for all of your corporate data assets. Essentially, it is the place where people can access their data. The existence of a Data Warehouse within an organization is not a true indicator of a successful BI environment. The Data Warehouse can quickly become a quagmire of meaningless and unrelated data; and also a bottleneck in obtaining meaningful analysis on your organization’s activities.
Planning, implementing and maintaining a Data Warehouse and/or Business Intelligence solution represents both a major financial and technical investment for your organization.
What are some of the elements that your organization can focus on in order to obtain true value from a Data Warehouse implementation?
- Establish Data Governance
The Data Warehouse could drive the development of a data governance standard for Your organization. This would promote a common understanding and definition of data elements that are used within Your organization applications.
This could also increase the success rate of integrating future projects, such as integrating a SAP HR/Payroll module with a planned web solution that requires the ability to identify Your organization employee ids.
- Reliable Results
A report consumer must have confidence that their report data is correct if they are expected to promote or act upon the data. If the consumer does not have confidence in the data then the Data Warehouse will quickly become a vast repository of meaningless data, and not an effective tool for implementing and realizing business change. The Data Warehouse should strive toward delivering one version of the truth.
A higher confidence rate in the report results will also permit greater leverage for reporting on historical trends for Your organization business lines.
- BI Vendor Selection
Your organization should look at implementing one BI solution in order to report against a Data Warehouse. Choosing one specific BI tool will provide the following financial benefits:
§ Repeatable reporting solutions through a pattern of proven practices will reduce development costs
§ Centralized license management
§ Identify architecture requirements for reporting solutions
§ Reduced BI project risk; increased BI project success rate
§ Targeted employee training
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§ Participate in shared services initiatives from PWGSC
§ Manageable upgrades for future releases
§ One BI tool will help to develop a specialized service for delivering business value to Your organization. This will also help to streamline the service delivery to report consumers.
- BICC (Business Intelligence Competency Centre)
The objective of the BICC is to lead the development of a centralized reporting environment. This requires a shared vision amongst business, technical, and management within Your organization. Creating an open channel of communication for BI initiatives amongst all parties will help to identify project risks or constraints in the initial planning stages of the project planning cycle. This will help to reduce wasted spending on idle resources and unnecessary software services or hardware.
The BICC Committee will provide guidance and support to the Data Warehouse group as they steward the following four responsibility centres:
§ People – provide BI reporting services to clients, and support human resource training and learning objectives
§ Process – provide business value to Your organization, and establish a defined process for BI Warehouse service delivery
§ Technology – implement and support Data Warehouse and a chosen BI technology
§ Performance – the key metric that combines the successful management of technology, process and technology
- Human capital
Your organization’s data is contained in two main entities – the application repositories and its human resources. The creation of a Data Warehouse must also include a review session with the key stakeholders that have a responsibility as: end users, DBAs, Business, and IT. The Your organization resources would also be able to provide history on the lessons learned within the organization.
The release of the Data Warehouse will have a higher acceptance rate if all stakeholders have been able to provide input toward the creation of a warehouse that addresses their real reporting requirements and not a generic or canned approach that provides no true value.
- Application Inventory
In order for the Data Warehouse to be considered a true corporate asset then it must contain the data from the applications that are in use within Your organization. This would require a review of all of the applications that are currently and planned to be deployed within the organization.
This exercise will also encourage the approach of identifying common Data Marts that could provide more in-depth reporting analysis. For example: if Data Mart A contains information of cancer rates amongst German cites, while Data Mart B contains data on corporations that have been fined for pollution controls then Your organization would now be able to identify the relationship between cancer rates and pollution in German cities.
