Requirement analysis in data warehouses to support external information

Abstract

In strategic decision-making, the decision maker needs to exploit the strategic information provided by decision support systems (DSS) and the strategic external information emanating from the enterprise business environment. The data warehouse (DW) is the main component of a data-driven DSS. In the field of DW design, many approaches exist but ignore external information and focus only on internal information coming from the operational sources. The existing approaches do not provide any instrument to take into account external information. In this paper, our objective is to introduce two models that will be employed in our approach: the requirement model and the environment model. These models are the basis of our DW design approach that supports external information. To evaluate the requirement model, we will illustrate with an example how to obtain external information useful for decision-making.