How To Do a Data Warehouse Assessment (And Why)

　　This decomposition also provides an excellent framework to specify and communicate the potential scope of the assessment project, and the range of its expected deliverables. Gaps, risks, constraints, opportunities, and resulting recommendations may be identified for each of these areas.

Figure 1: Decomposing the Data Warehouse

　　Business Needs Assessment includes an analysis of the underlying business drivers and objectives and overall context of business need that has been established for the data warehouse. In an assessment the objective is not to perform the analysis. It is to determine the degree of analysis that has been done, and to identify any business analysis gaps and their impacts. In some instances no business needs analysis has been done. In these cases some high level identification and ranking of business information needs is an essential part of the assessment; necessary for the assessment to have any meaningful context in which gap analysis is performed and recommendations are developed. When business needs have been defined, the assessment process examines the approach to capturing business requirements, their completeness and organization, the priorities of the requirements, and alignment of the data warehouse release strategy and deliverables to the needs. In conjunction with the Technical Architecture Assessment (see below) it considers how effectively front-end tools are applied.

　　The following key questions are among those that a business needs assessment may address:

　　Have business drivers and objectives been identified?

　　Have business requirements been documented?

　　Do the requirements align with business drivers and objectives? Do they focus on strategies that respond to the drivers?

　　Do the information needs identify and target the enabling of specific business processes and tactics?

　　Do the information needs identify the key performance indicators (business metrics) and business perspectives (dimensions, descriptive attributes) needed to measure, analyze, and optimize the targeted business processes?

　　Do they identify the roles to be supported, their number and distribution?

　　Do they identify the frequency and volume of reporting and analytical needs?

　　Information Architecture Assessment includes an analysis of logical data structures, their feasibility, completeness, documentation, and fit to business requirements. Information architecture assessment also includes analysis of data sourcing and transformation, the methods and assumptions applied, and validation of mappings to business requirements. Metadata, as part of the information architecture, is examined with respect completeness of metadata being tracked, user metadata requirements, and approaches to management of the metadata. A review of metadata tools is undertaken in conjunction with the Technical Architecture Assessment (see below).

　　Key questions addressed by information architecture assessment include:

　　Are the information requirements modeled?

　　Do they map to and support the identified business requirements?

　　Have they been considered in context of the broader enterprise?

　　Have key data life cycles have been traced and documented? (to identify correct points and periodicity of data capture and associated business rules)

　　Are data transformations fully documented?

　　Have user and operational metadata needs been identified? Is a metadata strategy to meet these needs identified and implemented?

　　Have data quality issues have been identified and addressed? Do users trust the data being delivered?

　　Do the users understand what data is available, what the data is, and how to use it?

　　Can users get to, manipulate, and analyze the data when and in form needed?(overlaps with technical architecture benchmarks)

　　Does data access and analysis clearly add business value and meet business needs?

　　Is the underlying data architecture flexible and extensible? Can it support multiple analytical needs? Does it readily allow for integration of new data?

　　Technical Architecture Assessment looks at current hardware, software and network infrastructure, and examines physical database designs. Technical architecture assessment seeks to identify any technical risks or constraints with regard to performance, maintenance, scalability, data distribution, disaster recovery, and sizing. This assessment also seeks to identify opportunity to leverage the value of existing technical resources. Effective use of tools, and their overall fit to the business and technical environments is examined, including extraction and transformation, cleansing, database performance tuning, modeling, metadata management, querying, multidimensional analysis, web enabling tools.

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