6.5. INFORMATION DELIVERY STRATEGY
The impact of business requirements on the information delivery mechanism in a data warehouse is straightforward. During the requirements definition phase, users tell you what information they want to retrieve from the data warehouse. You record these requirements in the requirements definition document. You then provide all the desired features and content in the information delivery component. Does this sound simple and straightforward? Although the impact appears to be straightforward and simple, there are several issues to be considered. Many different aspects of the requirements impact various elements of the information delivery component in different ways.
The composition of the user community that is expected to use the data warehouse affects the information delivery strategy. Are most of the users power users and analysts? Then the information strategy must be slanted toward providing potent analytical tools. Are many of the users expecting to receive preformatted reports and to run precomposed queries? Then query and reporting facilities in the information delivery component must be strengthened.
The broad areas of the information delivery component directly impacted by business requirements are:
Queries and reports
Types of analysis
Information distribution
Decision support applications
Growth and expansion
Figure 6-6 shows the impact of business requirements on information delivery.
A data warehouse exists for one reason and one reason ...
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