CHAPTER 5
DEFINING THE BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS
CHAPTER OBJECTIVES
- Discuss how and why defining requirements is different for a data warehouse
- Understand the role of business dimensions
- Learn about information packages and their use in defining requirements
- Review methods for gathering requirements
- Grasp the significance of a formal requirements definition document
A data warehouse is an information delivery system for business intelligence. It is not about technology, but about solving users' problems and providing strategic information to the user. In the phase of defining requirements, you need to concentrate on what information the users need, not so much on how you are going to provide the required information. The actual methods for providing information will come later, not while you are collecting requirements.
Before we proceed, let us clarify the scope and content of this chapter. In this chapter, we will focus on determining requirements for what was referred to as the practical approach in Chapter As we discussed in that chapter, we plan for an enterprise-wide solution; then we gather requirements for each data mart, subject by subject. These requirements will enable us to implement conformed data marts, one by one, on a priority basis; eventually to cover the needs of the entire enterprise.
On the other hand, if the goal is to take a strictly top-down approach and build an enterprise-wide data warehouse first, determining the requirements will be different from what ...
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