Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
RUNNING ON EMPTY
There are only so many hours in a day. Depending upon what needs to be done,
the total number of resources available to work on data warehousing can easily
be exhausted—''exhausted'' as in you can run out of time and each of the
individuals can be fatigued. The more skilled the project teams becomes, the
more is expected of them. Sometimes you can push everyone to work a little
harder to get a specific deliverable finished, but you cannot expect people to
give that extra effort with no end in sight. Ensure that sufficient resources, both
IT and business personnel, are allocated to maintain the data warehouse. Keep
an eye on the balance of new project resource needs and the available
personnel— again, both IT and business. If you are falling short, you must add
more resources or reduce the work.
The result of the prioritization process is a new set of projects that need to
follow the standard project planning procedures. Now that you have identified
what projects will be started to expand and grow the data warehouse, it is
worth taking some time to look at leveraging skilled data warehouse staff
members across the organization.
Managing Enterprise DW Resources
Many organizations find that putting together a project team and setting
up ongoing support is sufficient. There is clear coordination from project to
project because the same people are involved in all the work. If you work for a
large enterprise, however, this is not the case. The staffing and management of
people across the organization is significantly different. Often, people and their
skill sets are listed in a human resources database. When forming a project
team, this database is used to locate the people needed to fill the different
roles. This is based on both who has the background or base skills and who is
available at the right time.
This creates a much higher level of complexity to ensure consistency across
the data warehouse environment. It is not unusual to have a project team
of 10 - 15 people. If eight projects are under way across the enterprise, then
you may have 80 - 120 people working in the data warehouse environment.
Additional strategies are needed to leverage data warehouse knowledge and
techniques. Some sort of centralization of data warehousing resources is
needed.
Creating an Enterprise Data Warehouse Team
A single centralized team of data warehousing professionals can be formed.
This is a collection of the most experienced people from across the organization.
It may also be called a
center of excellence
for data warehousing. Their jobs
