Database Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 3
Planning Solutions
He who fails to plan is planning to fail.
—Winston Churchill
The most important first step in designing a data warehouse (DW)/business intelligence (BI)
system, paradoxically, is to stop.
—Ralph Kimball
Planning is fundamentally important in any undertaking. This is no less true in the case of creating a BI solution.
Although no plan is perfect and a protracted planning process is the bane of many projects, even simple BI
solutions can benefit from some planning. The trick is to find a balance.
In this chapter, we show you techniques to plan a BI solution. We include tips on conducting interviews, data
identification, and documenting your plan as well as examples of documentation that is easy to create within
a minimal amount of time. We also give you tips on building a BI solution team, defining the different roles the
team will play, determining the infrastructure needs of your BI solution, and estimating the cost.
By the end of this chapter, you will have preliminary plans to start implementation on the demo BI solution
used throughout this topic.
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It is not our intent to turn this chapter into a project management book, especially because documentation
alone isn't going to create the BI solution. We would much rather get to the part where we are creating our project.
One problem that repeatedly presents itself, however, is stumbling across a project with no documentation at all.
This is likely because many developers do not even know where to begin, from estimating how long the project is
going to take to what simple documentation should look like. Most of the books we have found do not discuss this
process. Therefore, we decided that we would change that with our topic and give you an example of how to create
some basic and relatively painless documentation.
Note
