Data Warehousing Fundamentals for IT Professionals

CHAPTER 14

MATCHING INFORMATION TO THE CLASSES OF USERS

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

• Appreciate the enormous information potential of the data warehouse
• Carefully note all the users who will use the data warehouse and devise a practical way to classify them
• Delve deeply into the types of information delivery mechanisms
• Match each class of user to the appropriate information delivery method
• Understand the overall information delivery framework and study the components

Let us assume that your data warehouse project team has successfully identified all the pertinent source systems. You have extracted and transformed the source data. You have the best data design for the data warehouse repository. You have applied the most effective data cleansing methods and gotten rid of most of the pollution from the source data. Using the most optimal methods, you have loaded the transformed and cleansed data into your data warehouse database. Then what?

After performing all of these tasks most effectively, if your team has not provided the best possible mechanism for delivery of business intelligence to your users, you have really accomplished nothing from the users' perspective. As you know, the data warehouse exists for one reason and one reason alone. It is there just for providing strategic information to your users. For the users, the information delivery mechanism is the data warehouse. The user interface for information is what determines the ultimate success of your data warehouse. If the interface ...