Data Warehousing For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 18. User Testing, Feedback, and Acceptance

In This Chapter

• Making users an important part of your data warehousing project

• Letting real business situations determine how you design your data warehouse

• Defining user acceptance

And now, presenting The Data Warehousing User's Anthem, as sung by a misinformed, snooty data warehousing specialist (with apologies to James Taylor):

Don't know much about the OLAP tool

I think data mining is for fools

Don't know what a database is for

Just give me a bunch of data to the core.

Now, I don't claim to be a technologist

But I'll pretend to be

Cause then I can sit in meetings all day long

Rather than become just another worker bee.

This song summarizes the most contemptible attitude I've seen (occasionally) on the part of those who deem themselves data warehousing professionals.

To be perfectly clear, this song doesn't reflect my view of users in a data warehousing project (or any project, for that matter). Increasingly, however, I've noticed a changing perception among some data warehousing specialists. They seem to be saying, "We know what's best for your data warehouse — not just the tools, but also how you should use the data, what levels of detail you should have — all that. Step aside, step aside: professionals at work."

Note

Without user involvement during all stages of a data warehousing project (from the first moments of the project's scope, not just during after-the-fact testing of what has been developed "for them"), you can't have a successful ...