The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server™ 2005 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset

14.6. Summary

The goal of this chapter is to highlight the most important issues for you to think about when deploying a DW/BI system. Deploying a system safely and successfully requires a lot of work and planning. You need the entire DW/BI team and help from business experts.

The DW/BI team has to focus on developing solid operations and performance tests. Equally important, these back-room folks should concentrate on building and testing a playbook for the actual deployment process. The deployment playbook is vitally important when you're adding new functionality to an existing system, while minimizing end user impact. The goal for the play-book should be to write instructions so clear and simple that anyone could follow them. You shouldn't have to think deep thoughts while you're trying to deploy a system.

The front-room team focuses on queries, reports, and user interactions. During the deployment process, this team concentrates on running quality assurance tests on the data and reports. You have to rely heavily on the business experts for this testing work too. They're the ones who will confirm the data's accuracy. The front-room team also needs to develop system documentation, tools for searching and viewing that documentation, and training for the business users. Unless you've done documentation and training development before, you'll be surprised at how much time it takes to do this "soft" stuff well.

In our experience, problems with deploying a system almost always derive ...