A business-orientated approach to data warehouse development

Abstract

Several surveys have indicated that many data warehouses fail to meet business objectives or are outright failures. One reason for this is that requirement engineering is typically overlooked in real projects. This paper addresses data warehouse design from a business perspective by highlighting business strategy analysis, alignment between data warehouse objectives and a firm's strategy, goal-orientated information requirements' modeling and how an underlying multidimensional data warehouse model may be derived. A set of guidelines is provided allowing developers to design a data warehouse aligned with a prevailing business strategy. A classic case study is presented.