A Manager's Guide to Data Warehousing

Chapter 2. The Executive's FAQ for Data Warehousing

When you are in a leadership role within an organization, you are charged with the responsibility of setting corporate goals and defining the strategic initiatives to meet them. You influence and inspire others in the organization to help fulfill the vision and achieve these goals. This is simple in theory, but much tougher in practice. You need to ask questions and challenge the status quo. As a business or IT leader, it is easier to ask questions and understand the answers within your part of the organization, but there can be a high degree of frustration when working across IT and business boundaries. When business leaders are asked whether they are getting what they need from their IT organization to run their business, or when IT leaders are asked whether they are getting what they need from the business to build a data warehouse that will meet business challenges, the answer from both is often the same: no.

Part of the problem is an assumption that both business and IT inherently understand each other's needs, when in reality the only way to truly understand the requirements is to work side by side and learn from each other. As leaders, we want to see a return on our investment (ROI). In this case, that investment is the partnership between business and IT. If you don't invest in the partnership, then you will never see the return you want in your data warehouse.

This chapter is intended to provide a big dose of reality. It ...