How To Do a Data Warehouse Assessment (And Why)

 　　Some of the key questions of technical architecture assessment include:

　　Does the technical architecture provide for the right range of data delivery services? (e.g. report publishing; canned queries; ad hoc querying; analytical models, etc.)

　　Do the data and information services reach the right people? The right business processes? Do data warehouse services integrate with other business processes where needed?

　　Is current access and query performance adequate? What about performance of data acquisition and warehouse refresh processes?

　　Will the technical architecture scale to increasing demands to support more processing power, more users, more data, more frequent and higher volume queries, new applications and front ends, and new technology components?

　　Is the need to secure sensitive data from unauthorized access and alteration being met? Is a proper balance of security and accessibility being achieved?

　　Are the right tools implemented, deployed, and effectively used to support environment specific needs? Consider tools for data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL), performance and usage monitoring, environment tuning; metadata management, metadata access and delivery; and information access, delivery, and analysis.

　　Organizational Assessment includes an examination of the existing organizational structure and identification of the roles and responsibilities of both IT and the business community that need to be addressed. In conjunction with the Project Planning and Methodology Assessment (below), this review considers alignment of the project organization with the overall business and IT environments. Organizational readiness for warehousing is examined, including readiness to assume responsibility for ongoing technical and business support, hardware and software configuration management, continuing business requirements definition, and front end applications enhancement. Organizational assessment strongly focuses upon the organization's ability to fulfill many warehousing roles. Readiness is a major factor in planning and staging the overall implementation of the data warehouse.

　　Among the key questions that organizational assessment addresses are:

　　Have roles and responsibilities for the data warehouse been identified and documented?

　　Has ownership of the data warehouse been addressed from the perspective of strategic business objectives and direction setting? From the perspective of tactical enhancement and ongoing business needs? From perspectives of information management and technical support and responsibilities?

　　Has the key issue of business/IT collaboration been directly articulated and addressed?

　　Has overall organizational readiness (in terms of business and IT skills) been considered in the data warehouse deployment strategy?

　　Has the need for ongoing operational support and tuning, in parallel with continuing development, been considered?

　　Has tactical support to the business community been planned for? Are support roles and responsibilities identified to help current business users understand how to leverage data warehouse capabilities and to identify new requirements?

　　Have data stewardship roles, data quality practices, and metadata management responsibilities been implemented? Do both business and IT organizations have appropriate responsibilities here?

　　Has the data warehouse been positioned organizationally within a broader context of enterprise information and knowledge management?

　　Has a plan, process, and structure been established for ongoing training of users and enhancement of technical skills?

　　Has any structure been put in place for ongoing monitoring of data warehouse quality, and for periodic assessments, as needed?

　　Project Planning and Methodology Assessment performs a review of the project plan, including its tasks, timing and resources. In addition to common project variables (time, resources, and results) the project assessment looks at extended factors such as project communication, decision making structures, change management and issue resolution processes, and business/IT collaboration (overlaps with organizational review). The data warehousing life cycle and the methodology being applied are assessed. Project team composition and skills are considered as a key factor in this part of the assessment. Finally, an assessment is made of the overall release and implementation strategy – this activity dependent upon and influenced by all of the preceding assessment perspectives.

　　Common questions answered by project planning and methodology assessment include (many are basic project management benchmarks):

　　Does a resource leveled project plan exist?

　　Are deliverables clearly identified?

　　Are deliverable artifacts properly managed?

　　Are frequent checkpoints and walkthroughs included?

　　Are there long stretches with no deliverables?

　　Are there clear issue resolution and change management processes? Are they effective and are they used?

　　Are project roles and responsibilities well defined?

　　Have effective lines and forms of project communication been defined and established?

　　Does the project plan implement a good data warehouse methodology? (include reference to previously published Journal articles on methodology selection and evaluation)

　　Does the plan provide for incremental delivery of business value according to business priorities, budget, and technical feasibility?

　　Is the project adequately staffed with the right skills?

　　Does the project have access to the necessary business stakeholders, subject matter experts, technical assets and technical support?

　　These perspectives provide a very workable approach to specify the scope of an assessment, define its anticipated outcomes, and organize assessment activities. On completion of data gathering and analysis from individual perspectives, the individual findings must be synthesized and consolidated into an integrated action plan. The action plan should include a phased strategy to move ahead with data warehousing.

　　Partitioning the areas of analysis also offers a degree of “selectable component” approach to data warehouse assessments. The partitions provide a framework by which an assessment may be tailored to individual and specific needs. It may be apparent, for example, that one area clearly requires immediate attention and urgent action. An assessment focused on that perspective may be performed first to address immediate needs. When using such a selective approach, beware of too narrow a scope. Also consider the above list of perspectives and questions as a completeness test for data warehousing assessments.