The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit

Program/Project Management

BI

Application

Development

Physical

Design

ETL

Design &

Development

Dimensional

Modeling

Product

Selection &

Installation

Business

Requirements

Definition

Technical

Architecture

Design

Program/

Project

Planning

Deployment

Growth

Maintenance

BI

Application

Design

CHAPTER 13

Deploying and

Supporting the

DW/BI System

T

he deployment step is the most exciting phase of the Lifecycle when we

finally present the data warehouse and its BI front end to the business

community. The quality of this first impression drives the acceptance of the

DW/BI solution — and you only get one shot at it. Like any big event, there

are a lot of details that must fall into place for the show to be successful.

Deployment includes all the pieces needed to give the business users access

to the information in a form that works for them. Much of this starts early

in the Lifecycle; at the same time that you are creating the architecture and

building the data warehouse and the BI applications, you also need to be

creating documentation, preparing training, and organizing the user support

processes. All these operational services need to be in place before the curtain

goes up for the first time.

The technical tasks of testing and deploying the system are not as much fun

as the user-facing rollout tasks. It’s detail-oriented work to move code from

the development environment to the test system, fully test both functionality

and performance, ...