Benefits of

Data Warehouse Assessment

 Title: Benefits of DW Assessment
Summary:
In the current competitive business environment, a successful data warehouse implementation contributes to
the success of the business and aligns with future strategies. However many organizations have spent millions
of dollars on business intelligence/data warehousing (BI/DW) solutions and realize that the solution has yielded
less than expected ROI and has increased the total cost of ownership for these organizations to maintain the
DW solutions.

Top Reasons for DW Assessment:

In general when implementing a DW solution, we need to constantly keep revalidating the strategy as we
progress, depending on the environmental factors. We typically adopt a phased roadmap BI/DW solution,
which can be even tougher as there is no static goal to be achieved. The goal for a BI/DW solution is
continuously shifting due to the several factors as listed below:

 Business needs to be served by the DW can change with changes in the business processes.
 Changes to an environment like a merger, acquisition or a restructuring can introduce radically
different requirements.
 Emerging technologies and growing maturity require recalibration of strategy. An organization that was
comfortable with basic reporting and analytics, would want to mature over a period of time and move
up the continuum towards dashboards/scorecards, data mining, predictive analytics and operational BI.

Types of DW Assessments & Challenges:

One of the major reasons for assessing a DW depends on the type of assessment. Based on our past
experiences at Reliable Software, we can classify the assessment into two broad types as indicated in the
graphic below.

When a data warehouse assessment is initiated, it is frequently expected to produce much more than an
identification of current weaknesses and recommendations of how to address them. It is particularly common
that the assessment is expected to produce a complete statement of business requirements – to provide a
business context that was missing or incomplete when the warehousing initiative was started. While
comprehensive requirements analysis is possible, it may be impractical within the scope and time constraints
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 of an assessment. With the actual scope and overall state of affairs generally in question going into the
assessment, it is difficult to estimate the time and effort of additional business requirements analysis. Business
alignment analysis may be more appropriate to the scope of assessment.

A final challenge of data warehouse assessment is the need to establish clarity and consensus on the scope,
exact deliverables, and expected outcome of the assessment.

Reliable Software DW Assessment Strategy & Framework

Data warehousing represents a large, complex undertaking with many, interdependent parts. The first step of a
data warehouse assessment is determining where to begin, what to produce, and how to produce it.
Complexity of the assessment is compounded by partial artifacts of previous projects, missing history, and
multiple agendas. As with any complex undertaking, assessment is most successful when the large, complex
problem is divided into smaller, more manageable pieces. Our past experiences at Reliable Software have
shown that decomposition a DW assessment Strategy is the most effective strategy to conduct a DW
assessment.

Reliable Software’s DW assessment strategy and framework has gone through many iterations based on
several years of industry experiences and we recommend that decomposing the assessment is idealistic for
optimal results as shown in the graphic below.

The below figure indicates Reliable Software’s innovative DW Assessment Framework

The above framework provides a complete landscape for the assessment strategy and will address several
critical areas during the entire life cycle of the assessment.

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 The below mentioned areas describes a detailed activity of the DataFactZ’s framework that will be addressed
during each phase of the assessment.

 Business Needs: Business need assessment includes an analysis of the underlying business drivers,
objectives and overall context of the business need that has been established for analytical purposes.
This helps identify current business issues and gaps in the existing solution leading to a quantitative
and qualitative feel on the capability of the solution and the value perception on the benefits and ROI
accrued from the solution. Maturity of the solution implemented is important to be understood (on the
maturity continuum of basic analytics, dashboard/scorecard implementations, data mining, predictive
analytics) to craft a solution that will push the organization up the maturity curve.

 Information Architecture: This includes an analysis of logical data structures, their feasibility,
completeness, documentation and fit to business requirements. A detailed analysis of how well the
metadata is maintained in the organization is important to be achieved here. An assessment is also
done through a structured scenario analysis approach on the nimbleness of the data model to adapt to
changing business requirements (say a merger, an acquisition or a restructure) and the
scalability/flexibility of the data model to emerging requirements.

 Technical Architecture: This technical evaluation is focused on assessing the current underlying
hardware, software and network infrastructure. Also examines the physical database designs.
Performance scaling issues due to size of data and proliferation of independent tools demanding more
infrastructure are common concerns that will be discovered. In some cases we may find several
different tools are used for reporting and which brings many complications on the usage of the DW and
maintenance of these different reporting tools which will directly affect the ROI of the DW. DW/BI is an
area that is still continuously evolving from a tool maturity perspective and you can have a situation
where the tool vendor’s consistent version changes introduce risk to the implementation.

 Organization: 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.

 Project Planning and Methodology Assessment: During this phase 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

The above mentioned framework activity will uncover several major factors which will serve as good
foundation to improvise the existing DW implementation. However in some cases they are few
miscellaneous and critical issues that may come into play due to the reason that the DW’s are typically
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 large and complex solutions, and so is the process of assessing them. These solutions typically cut
across multiple functional areas within the organizations attempting to bring in certain amounts of
standardization and transparency across the organization. It attempts to tear down the protection walls
that people have created over a long period of time among functional domains. It also surfaces the
inherent divide that we find between the functional and the IT sides of the organizations. Thus, there
are a few critical considerations to address prior to embarking on a BI/DW assessment.

 Managing politics. DW solutions as mentioned above tend to be operating in sensitive situations.

Therefore, assessment teams need to be capable in terms of managing the politics between the various
stakeholders.

There is a two-fold approach to address this:

1. Having a strong team capable of managing such sensitive environments, and

2. Being absolutely rigorous in your data collection and logical synthesis.

It also dictates the need to maintain neutrality and objectivity in the assessments. Regardless of
whether the business or IT function initiated the assessment, it must be performed from the
perspective of information as an asset to the enterprise.

 Managing expectations. While organizations appreciate the logical value assessments, the maturity to
sign-off a budget for an assessment is low. Hence, they start looking at expanding the scope and expect
the assessment to produce exhaustive business requirements. While it is possible, considering the tight
timelines that assessments are typically expected to adhere, it is best avoided.

 Considering best practices. A good approach to manage internal differences and diffusing cross-
functional positions is to leverage industry best practices while recommending solutions. It tends to be
less controversial and if an external party is present, it makes the decision-making process smoother.

Building on these core considerations, and the environmental situation prevalent in the organization, we need
to adopt a fine-tuned assessment approach for the organization. What usually works is a combination of
structured and somewhat unstructured approaches. On the structured side, we need to have facilitated group
sessions, questionnaires and interviews. In any of these sessions, the script should not be too restraining and
should provide flexibility to explore based on the responses to the unstructured aspects. Asking the right
questions at the right time is the basis for successful assessments and leading questions provide a basic check
list to advance. We need to be prepared to drill down as far as necessary to obtain the needed information.
Leading questions are often the start and the answers point the way to identifying weaknesses and proposing
improvements.

About Reliable Software Resources, Inc.

Reliable Software Resources Inc. is a leading provider of information technology consulting and provides high-value,
industry-specific IT solutions and is a pure-play IT project implementation and system Integration Company with cost
effective delivery model for its clients. Our project delivery solution emphasizes local accountability and a flexible mix of
global resources. The result is more-practical and actionable recommendations and the right-sized services that tightly
align to your needs. Reliable Software’s services are offered on a project- or strategic-staffing basis, across all technology
platforms, operating systems and infrastructures. Reliable Software Resources Inc., Consulting practice has national foot
print in United States and has been recognized as one of the fastest growing companies by Inc. Visit us online at
www.rsrit.com or follow us on Linked In, Facebook & Twitter.
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