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Data Warehousing Solution

Need a data warehousing solution and want practical standards and best practices for information management and data governance

What is a data warehouse?

A data warehouse solution should be based on the following information management disciplines.

Data Warehouse Solution

Information management framework

This framework evolves from an information management strategy study which produces an information management plan with recommended policies, standards, best practices and other information management discipline requirements needed to ensure successful implementation of data warehousing solutions.

Project management framework

This framework is produced as part of the information management framework and defines roles and responsibilities, tasks and deliverables for the following project phases required to implement an enterprise data warehouse:
  • Business case analysis;
  • Project planning;
  • Requirements analysis;
  • Architecture and design;
  • Development;
  • Quality assurance testing; and
  • Transition to production.
Data management framework

This framework is produced as part of the information management framework and defines roles and responsibilities, tasks and deliverables for the following data governance disciplines required to design, build and maintain an enterprise data warehouse:
  • Structure and design;
  • Data storage;
  • Data movement;
  • Data security;
  • Metadata; and
  • Data quality.
Change management framework

This framework is produced as part of the information management framework and defines roles and responsibilities, tasks and deliverables required to ensure a disciplined approach to introducing change to the production environment, which include:
  • Change management plan;
  • Change management methodology;
  • Change management process;
  • Request management process;
  • Release management plan; and
  • Configuration management plan.
What is a data warehouse?

An enterprise data warehouse is the cornerstone of information management. Data warehouse architecture involves:

  • Extracting data from operational systems;
  • Moving it into data warehouse structures;
  • Reorganizing and structuring the data for analysis purposes;
  • Moving it into reporting structures called data marts; and
  • Presenting it to knowledge workers using business intelligence analytic and decision support reporting tools.
Data Warehousing Solution Overview
Data Warehouse Architecture


What are source systems?

Source systems provide source data to data warehouses, either by:
  • Creating the data and making it available by "pushing it" to the data warehouse; or
  • By having the data warehouse perform the extract itself.
What is a staging area?

A staging area is used as the initial "landing" place for source data.

What is a clearing house?

A clearing house is like an extension of the staging area. Data is consolidated and organized for direct loading into the data warehouse.  Sometimes data which fails quality validation is stored in the clearing house until additional data loads correct the issue, or until a data steward makes appropriate modifications.

What is a data warehouse structure?

Data that has been cleaned and transformed in the staging and clearing house schema's is loaded into a data warehouse structure.

What are data mart structures?

Data marts are created to hold sub-sets of data warehouse data which are required for analysis and reporting purposes e.g. a shop floor management data mart, a sales data mart, a customer relationship management data mart.

Summary....

A data warehouse solution should be based on an approved data warehouse architecture and the following management frameworks:
  • Information management;
  • Data management;
  • Project management; and
  • Change management.
An information management architect has overall responsibility for designing the management frameworks and a data architect has overall responsibility for data warehousing solution architecture.



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