Historically, investments in Information Technology (IT) were focused on individual products or services. When a business manager needed to add/change a product or service, he/she owned the application system, people, process and technology that supported the change. With a single business owner, life was simple; people actually came to the same physical location and could rapidly work through issues. In today's world, decisions are more complicated from the onset; typically multiple business units are located in physical and virtual offices across the country and around the world. As companies strive to become customer-centric, it is increasingly difficult to add or change a product or service without affecting other parts of the enterprise that support the customer. The challenge in Data Warehousing is to develop a Data Warehouse (DW) organization that makes rapid and effective enterprise decisions and delivers business value quickly and accurately.

When a DW project gets off the ground, great care is taken to define the structure of the project team and to align with the specific business goal. If the first build-out is successful, there may be an explosion of demand and the fundamental processes that delivered the initial success are often abandoned. Abandoning the fundamentals typically results in problems with expectations, performance and/or funding; the result is the DW is viewed as falling short of expectations or as a failure.

The framework below illustrates an ongoing process to guide the evolution of the DW. A robust DW organization creates linkages to the business to rapidly set priorities based on business benefit (return on investment) and speeds the delivery of initiatives. The relationships of the groups within the framework and some commentary about them are provided below:

Organization Framework

Data Warehouse Steering Committee

A DW Steering Committee is an oversight committee comprised of executives and managers from both business and IT. Several key objectives of this cross functional team are to:

• set strategic direction of the DW
• approve major DW initiatives recommended by the Business Advisory Team (i.e. top 1-5 initiatives)
• commit resources
• support or implement data governance and stewardship programs
• review results from approved projects and monitor the service levels delivered to users
• approve or provide funding for additional DW capacity

A DW Steering Committee is a single point of authority and direction for all DW and Business Intelligence (BI) related initiatives within the organization. This central authority is especially important in data warehousing because when data is shared across the enterprise it no longer has a single owner. Since no single department or business unit may be totally responsible for the data, sound data governance practices should be adopted to ensure data standards are followed and that data quality is monitored and maintained. The DW Steering Committee also ensures that an enterprise-wide business perspective is taken for architecture, load strategy, service-level agreements, backup, recovery, and capacity planning efforts.

In many organizations the members of the DW Steering Committee include the CIO, IT Directors, business-unit VP's or directors, the Project Management Office director and the Data Governance Practice leader. Additionally, members may include senior representatives from non-operational areas such as finance and human resources if the DW includes those areas.

Executive Sponsor

The Executive Sponsor champions the DW strategy and its adoption at all levels of the enterprise. A major role of the champion is to communicate the importance of the DW across the enterprise. Communication can range from informal elevator discussions with fellow C-level executives to participation in selected meetings such as the Steering Committee, Business Advisory Team or User Forum. The Executive Sponsor also has a formal role to resolve issues that have been escalated by the Steering Committee and to provide funding where the amount exceeds the spending limits of the Steering Committee.

Business Advisory Team

The Business Advisory Team is comprised of senior business managers and key players in the CIO organization. Together, they review new projects that are initiated by the business areas. This team should have the ability to fund projects within certain limits, and should take recommendations above their approval limit to the Steering Committee for their approval. The Business Advisory Team needs to think outside the box; they should not simply align projects to available resources, instead, they must think how to utilize the Steering Committee and Executive Sponsor to get as many high priority (high ROI) projects completed as possible and to coordinate those projects as appropriate.

The Business Advisory team prioritizes DW project initiatives based on the following criteria:

• business benefit
• difficulty to execute
• availability of data

"Business benefit" comes from the business decisions and process changes that are executed, based on information. Business benefit can be the dollar value of increased revenue and/or reduced costs, or a percentage of these measurements. Often the increase in revenue needs to be scaled by the nominal margin of the business for comparison against costs. Some projects improve accuracy and timeliness of data needed to make decisions which may be factored into the benefit equation.

The "ability to execute" is based on several components such as the availability of qualified staff, both business and IT, to deliver the project. Another consideration is the degree of difficulty of the effort, for example, if the change requires approval from controlling boards in 50 states, the change might be much more difficult to execute, than a change involving only the inbound call center team. A DW initiative will include both easy and difficult components; recognizing this complexity is essential to developing a sound project priority list. Some easy projects are not appropriate, where some difficult ones can serve as competitive advantage efforts.

"Data availability" is simply the availability of data to answer the business questions associated with the process change. This measure considers the factors of whether the information is already available or whether it would need to be created or acquired from external sources. If the data is small, creating it could be a simple task versus the challenges of very large amounts of data. If the data is available but has data quality issues, it is less available than data well cleaned and reconciled to official company books.

Once the Business Advisory team completes their assessment, a high level chart like he one shown below can be produced with recommendations on proposed priority of initiatives.

IT Organizations

Connecting the CIO's Information Technology (IT) organization objectives to the business strategy is a key element of an effective DW. When IT becomes an integral part of executing projects with defined business value and sponsorship; the probability of project success increases significantly.

Business Subject Matter Experts

The staff in this area prepares the business case and requirements for projects. Once a project is approved, they work with IT to deliver the project by following the development methodology. An emerging "best practice" is for the Business Advisory Team to recommend using an Agile (rapid) development approach where feasible. The decision to use Agile or traditional development should be made as the Advisory team reviews each project.

User Forum

Another group that must be linked into the process is the diverse collection of end users. To accelerate the usage and acceptance of the DW it is important to build a sense of inclusion, understanding and excitement.

The first meetings of this group are designed to answer the question "What's in this for me?" The meeting should begin with a quick review of the overall plan and demonstrate key advantages of the DW. It should be explained that there will be a few bumps in the road during this process and that open communication from this group is expected to identify and resolve any problems that might occur.

As the DW and user base mature, these meetings can evolve into "brown bag lunches" where users give short presentations to one another on things they have discovered they can do with the DW and associated technology. This form of communication provides recognition to innovators and establishes linkages within the user community that can reduce the need for formalized support efforts.

Challenges

Is teamwork hard? In a word, yes.

Do the hatchets need to be buried in some cases? Yes.

Will nirvana be immediate? No.

It is recommended that the path to nirvana be measured by each individual project. When major initiatives are approved, the Steering Committee must remain engaged by monitoring results and helping to resolve obstacles in some situations. This increased visibility is a culture change for some organizations. Many eyes will be on the Steering Committee to see how they will manage a major initiative such as a DW. The Steering Committee should provide laser-like assistance to project teams to help the team achieve the planned ROI.

Reaping the Rewards

A Data Warehouse provides information to knowledge workers to enable them to understand and change the way their business operates. The framework described above can reduce the cycle of understand/change by aligning the involved parties around a universal concept; business benefit ($$$$$). A DW organization built around business benefit will accelerate activity and turn the Data Warehouse into a tool that delivers Competitive Advantage.

About The Author

Charles Griffith serves as a Senior Industry Consultant for Teradata's Financial Services, Insurance, Health Care and Life Sciences division. As "Practice Lead" for Data Governance and Data Warehouse Governance programs he has worked with many Teradata customers to develop and/or improve their Governance programs. Prior to joining Teradata (http://www.teradata.com), Charles developed and managed a highly acclaimed Data Warehouse program that was chronicled in reviews by Computer World, Info Week, American Banker and other publications. Charles has provided thought leadership as a presenter at international conferences such as the American Marketing Association, UC Berkeley Fisher Center for IT, Spanish Bankers Conference, FIMA and Interop. Charles has a BBA in Accounting from the University of Texas at Arlington; he can be reached at charles.griffith@teradata.com.