The Kimball Group Reader: Relentlessly Practical Tools for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence

Chapter 3. Project/Program Planning

With the historical perspective and grounding from the previous chapter, it's time to get everyone organized to embark on a DW/BI project. We begin this chapter by focusing on the project team, their role as information publishers, and the sometimes insurmountable realities that they confront. We then turn our attention to the all important business stakeholders. Finally, we describe the Kimball approach for tackling your DW/BI initiatives.

Professional Responsibilities

We begin by discussing what the data warehouse/business intelligence manager and team should (and shouldn't) do.

3.1 Professional Boundaries

Ralph Kimball, DBMS, Jul 1998

This article and the next discuss the similarities between a data warehouse manager's job and the responsibilities of an editor in chief.

The data warehouse manager's job is potentially huge, offering many opportunities and just as many risks. The data warehouse manager has been given control of one of the most valuable assets of any organization: the data. Furthermore, the data warehouse manager is expected to interpret and deliver that asset to the rest of the organization in a way that makes it most useful. All eyes are on the data warehouse manager.

In spite of all this visibility, many newly appointed data warehouse managers are simply given their titles without a clear job definition or a clear sense of what is and is not their responsibility. As an industry, we have been groping for a definition of the data warehouse ...