Database Reference
In-Depth Information
included from either inside or outside your organization that will improve
your analytical capabilities.
Finally, it is important to understand that this endeavor is likely to be
very visible within your organization. Most every C-level executive has been
reading about big data for the last several years and how it will solve many
oftheirdataissues.Thus,theywillhaveagreatinterestinthesolution.Also,
the initiative isn't trivial, and the budget of the solution alone will garner
interest from executives in the company. It is vital that your solution have
the sponsorship of one of these C-level executives so that they can represent
the solution to the rest of your company. They are your champion. They
should be included in regular monthly updates on the status of the projects.
Include them on your successes, but also inform them of the roadblocks
that are slowing the project down. Your executive sponsor can help rid
your organization of those roadblocks to ensure timely completion of the
solution.
As part of this process of defining the problem, it is vital to identify your
business user population. Your sponsor can usually help direct you to them,
but it is up to the solution architect to reach out to this population and
interview them. The purpose of the interviews is to identify the key expected
outputs of the solution. Of course, simply asking them what they want the
solution to do is inappropriate. After all, they are probably not technologists
and don't understand the art of the possible with big data. Instead, ask them
probing questions, such as the following:
• What does their job entail?
• How do they measure success?
• What are their current challenges with analytics in their group?
The purpose of these queries is to isolate the questions they will want to ask
of the data, and for you to determine whether the data you are collecting
actually supports the business drivers for the project. As the architect, do
notmakethemistakeofrelyingonhearsay;instead,godirectlytothesource
to ensure that information has not been lost in translation.
Scope Management
Scope management is vital to the success of any project. From the
beginning, you want to define the business needs of the project, data
integration with other sources, data latency requirements, and delivery
