14.3. WHO WILL USE THE INFORMATION?
You will observe that in six months after deployment of the data warehouse, the number of active users doubles. This is a typical experience for most data warehouses. Who are these new people arriving at the data warehouse for information? Unless you know how to anticipate who will come to get information, you will not be able to cater to their needs appropriately and adequately.
Anyone who needs strategic information is expected to be part of the groups of users. That includes business analysts, business planners, departmental managers, and senior executives. Each of the data marts may be built for the specific needs of one segment of the user groups. In this case, you can identify the special groups and cater to their needs. At this stage, when we are discussing information delivery, we are not considering the information content so much but the actual mechanism of information delivery.
Each group of users has specific business needs for which they expect to get answers from the data warehouse. When we try to classify the user groups, it is best to understand them from the perspective of what they expect to get out of the warehouse. How are they going to use the information content in their job functions? Each user is performing a particular business function and needs information for support in that specific job function. Let us, therefore, base our classification of the users on their job functions and organizational levels.
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