Data Warehouse Lifecycle Management

The key ingredient to any business decision is the information in the right user’s hands at the right time.  Organizations have spent millions of dollars on business intelligence infrastructure yet still are not seeing the returns they expected.   Large amounts of time and money have been spent developing enterprise data warehouses (EDW) to capture, cleanse and store all appropriate information in a single location, thus creating a single version of truth.  Business intelligence tools are then deployed against these structures.  While all the information is present many times user acceptance is low as the users do not understand what they are looking at and performance does not meet their expectation.  In successful shops, reporting layers or data marts are created to provide users with the information they need in a format that is easy to understand while delivering the performance user expect.

All design and development decisions must be made within the data warehouse lifecycle triangle.    One must understand the relationship between meeting end user requirements and providing the performance users have come to expect while understanding the impact that has on maintenance costs and processing windows.   Decisions focused too much on one area will add risk to a project increasing the possibility of delay or failure.

At LightPoint, our experience in building successful business intelligence applications helps our customers make the right decisions that are properly located within the data warehouse lifecycle triangle thus improving the user acceptance and ROI.

User Requirements

Building the initial prototype is important to ensure end users requirements are being met.  At LightPoint our extensive business intelligence experiences and technologies enables this process to be done within days instead of weeks thus reducing costs.  Also, once end user requirements our met, the prototype can easily be moved into production reducing time to market.

LightPoint offers a solution that provides the required information to the user base to ensure they make the right decisions at the right time while keeping the maintenance overhead to a minimum and ensuring load routines stay within processing windows.

Teamwork

Many areas of an organization are involved in building a successful business intelligence application.  DBA’s or data architects are responsible for building and maintaining the databases and ensuring the data is available when needed yet keeping in mind the work required to maintain these systems stays under control.  Business analysts or report developers are focused for obtaining requirements and building the reports needed to answer the business decisions at hand.  At times, the objectives of these organizations can conflict as additional structures may be needed to meet a particular user need and/or to work with a particular business intelligence tool. 

LightPoint understand this process and provides methodologies based on years of experience with proven technology to ensure all groups’ objects are met thus fostering a strong partnership between all and creating a win/win environment.

Documentation

Documentation is many times something that slips through the cracks. Once a project is completed resources are re-deployed to new projects and what if any documentation that was started is incomplete.  However, when changes or modifications come to an existing project or staff turn over occurs, the time and money saved by cutting corners quickly evaporates.  In addition, developers time is taken answering questions on where information is located, what was done to that information before it was loaded and where did that information come from.  At LightPoint the technology and methodologies we use provide the documentation and structure needed to ensure applications run efficiently and when changes come they are easily understood, implemented and deployed.

"To be successful a process and set of technologies must be in place to allow for rapid prototype development to ensure end users requirements are being met. Once met the process must support the ability to roll those business rules into production quickly and within budget. Finally as things are always changing, modifications and enhancements must be easily implemented and deployed. "

Data Architect,
Large Healthcare Organization