Sid Adelman & Associates

Well-run organizations routinely evaluate themselves every year or two. Organizations need an outside assessment by data warehouse experts who will identify the areas that are in need of serious attention and set a course to correct any problems. We offer an assessment of your organization’s data warehouse. This assessment is geared to the early adopters, those that have had some version of the data warehouse in place for two to four years and may be dissatisfied with the results. Does your organizations have any of the following characteristics?

• Expected ROI has not been realized

• Users are unhappy

• New projects are not being funded

• There is no integration among disparate data marts and/or data warehouses

• The data warehouse does not support the strategic objectives of the enterprise

• There is no control over developing or running the data warehouse

• Performance is unacceptable

This assessment will focus on the most critical areas, those areas that determine success or failure. The focus areas will include the assessment of:

1. Organization – roles, responsibilities, structure of the organization including the role of the user

2. Metadata – the strategy and implementation of data about data

3. Business value – cost justification and governance of projects

4. Methodology – the process by which the data warehouse is developed and maintained

5. Delivery and tools – the interface seen by the user

6. Architecture – the hardware, software and network that supports the data warehouse

7. Strategic direction – support of the strategic goals of the organization

8. Data acquisition and cleansing – the critical activity of sourcing, extracting and cleaning the data

9. Requirements – the process to determine just what information the users need

10. Data modeling – how models are developed and used for the data warehouse

11. Data base design – the design of the data warehouse databases being significantly different than those that are operational

12. Performance – response time as well as load/refresh/update performance

13. User satisfaction – usability of data, flexibility and responsiveness of IT to new requirements, satisfaction with the quality of the data

The offerings are targeted to the size of the organization, the number of people involved, the maturity of their data warehouse, and the opportunity for improvement.

These offerings can answer the following questions:

1. Is the organization effective? Are the necessary skills in place? Are the data warehouse roles and responsibilities properly defined?

2. How well is existing metadata being used? Is the metadata being properly and accurately captured? Are the right repository tools in place to capture and use metadata? What is the appropriate metadata strategy?

3. Are projects cost justified? Is the prioritization process adequate? How accurate is the cost estimating process? How accurately are benefits estimated? Are costs being accurately measured? Are benefits being accurately measured?

4. Is the current methodology appropriate to the data warehouse? By what process are projects planned? How effective and accurate is the planning? Are these processes reusable and repeatable?

5. Are the users happy with their query and reporting tools? From the users’ perspective, are the data structures usable? Is the data quality acceptable?

6. How good is the infrastructure, is it cost effective, does it support service level agreements? Are tools integrated? Will hardware and software scale for anticipated growth?

7. Does the data warehouse support the strategic direction of the enterprise; does it provide the right information in a timely manner?

8. How productive is the acquisition and cleansing process, are the right tools being used and are they being used effectively?

9. How effective are the data models for warehouse and data mart development? Do they provide an understanding of the source data? Does the metadata feed an end-user repository?

10. How effective and accurate is the process for gathering user requirements? How well are the requirements documented? How good is the process for gathering changing requirements? Is the IT staff responsive to changing requirements?

11. How good are the data warehouse database designs? Do they provide usable data structures and perform well?

12. How effective is the capacity planning process? Is response time acceptable? Is there are problem with loading, updating and refreshing databases? What process is used for tuning the databases? How scalable is the hardware and software architecture?

Please email Sid Adelman & Associates or call at (818) 783-9634 for further information about how to make your data warehouse more effective.