Top 10 Questions to Ask and Mistakes to Avoid When Building a Data Warehouse: Part I

by David Marco

You've read all the articles, attended all the conferences, and now you're charged up to start your own data warehousing/business intelligence (BI) project and attain that 401% return on investment (ROI) that you've heard everyone talking about. You've gone to the chief financial officer or the vice president of marketing and gained the funding for your enterprise data warehouse. Congratulations! Now it's time for the real work to begin. Oh, and by the way, you better be successful because this project won't be cheap, and all of the company's discerning eyes will be upon it. To start, you will have to evaluate and purchase extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) software, online analytical processing (OLAP) software, and all forms of hardware and middleware. You will have to hire expensive consultants. And if all that isn't difficult enough, remember an enterprise data warehouse involves integrating data from a corporate perspective. You will therefore have to interact with the most senior people in each of your company's divisions and guide them to consensus. And if you don't deliver on that 401% ROI and appease all of those division heads, you'll be organizing office layouts in the Siberian branch. This Executive Update will address the essential questions that require good answers before the data warehouse project can even begin. You can think of these as the top 10 questions to ask when building a data warehouse (see sidebar). In order to cover each of these questions in depth, we will present the first five in this Executive Update. The remaining five will be presented in Executive Update, Vol. 1, No. 10.