The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit

54 Chapter 2 ■ Launching and Managing the Project/Program

Believe the DW/BI databases should be designed like normalized trans-

action processing databases or only loaded with summary information.

Underestimate the data cleansing and quality assurance workload.

Pay more attention to ETL operational performance and ease of devel-

opment rather than BI query performance and ease of use. On the other

hand, the pendulum can swing too far in the other direction where

including every analytic bell-and-whistle puts so much burden on the

ETL that nothing ever comes out of the data kitchen.

Be oblivious to the need for BI applications to empower the business

community.

Last, but certainly not least, fail to acknowledge that DW/BI success

is tied directly to user acceptance. If the business community hasn’t

accepted the DW/BI system as a foundation for improved decision

making, your efforts have been exercises in futility.

Manage the Program

In this final section, we explore DW/BI program management concepts. Until

this point, we have focused on the needs of an individual project iteration of

the Lifecycle because this is commonly where organizations begin. However,

once the initial project is deployed successfully, demand will increase rapidly,

creating the need and opportunity for coordination and management across

individual projects.

Program management elevates awareness above the individual release or

project effort. While the DW/BI environment will continue to expand in

small manageable chunks on a project-by-project basis, the program looks

across those discrete iterations, leveraging learning and development from

one project to others. While we focus on delivering business value with

each and every project, the potential organizational impact begins to grow

exponentially when we focus on synchronization at the program level.

When we described team responsibilities earlier in this chapter, we were

already introducing the program perspective, especially with the front office

DW/BI director or program manager roles. In addition, the architects and

data stewards often operate at a program capacity. Players with program-level

responsibilities need to focus on the following activities.

Establish Governance Responsibility and Processes

Although the solo senior business sponsor may be perfectly adequate for the

first iteration of your DW/BI environment, the program manager will want

to establish a more permanent and broader governance structure, typically

Manage the Program 55

in the form of an executive level steering committee or advisory board.

Composed of representatives from various business units, the governance

steering committee meets regularly, typically quarterly or semi-annually, to

set goals, establish priorities, and allocate funds. Strong, effective governance

committees share the following characteristics:

Visionary leadership. Just as with individual business sponsors,

members of the governance committee need to both visualize and

verbalize the potential impact of improved information on the organi-

zation’s key initiatives. They need to be passionate about the cause or

step aside, because they’ll be asked to rally others up, down, and across

the organization. As the business and its initiatives evolve, the vision for

DW/BI must also evolve.

Prioritize based on enterprise-level needs. The governance

committee must resist the urge to lobby for their own special interest

group. Members need to focus on the good of the greater whole, even

if that means their departmental desires end up on the back burner.

The prioritization technique that we mentioned earlier in this chapter

and elaborate on in Chapter 3 is a powerful technique to institutional-

ize with the group for ongoing prioritization exercises. Often members

of the DW/BI governance committee also participate in the organiza-

tion’s annual planning process to establish key business goals and objec-

tives, which is excellent input to the DW/BI prioritization activity.

Support enterprise data integration. Consistent, integrated data

sounds like an IT concern, but the executive governance committee must

be equally concerned. They must clearly understand the business bene-

fits of integration and show their support. Enterprise data integration

faces far more political challenges than technical obstacles. Without

executive commitment, integration will remain an IT pipe dream.

Prepare to spend money for the long haul. Unfortunately, establish-

ing an environment to support business analysis doesn’t come cheap and

the maintenance costs don’t go away. Of course, just as you can choose to

drive an economy or luxury car, the same holds true for DW/BI

implementations. The executive governance board needs to provide

ongoing financial support for the foreseeable future. DW/BI programs

collapse without adequate funding. On the other hand, it is also possi-

ble to overspend; although a big budget provides short-term euphoria

for the team, nothing is sustainable if the costs exceed the benefits.

Ensure IT and the business remains aligned. Though the DW/BI

program/project often starts out well-intentioned with initially tight

alignment between the business and IT, it’s easy to drift back to his-

torical comfort zones. The governance committee needs to relentlessly