W2 Asign Determining Requirement in Data Warehousing - Essay Example

Determining Requirement: Data Warehousing al Affiliation Determining Requirement: Data Warehousing How will you determine what types of information delivery methods are needed? As the query tools specialist in a project team for a manufacturing company, the types of information delivery methods needed would depend on the types of users in the organization. According to Ponniah (2010), the following types of users are normally encountered in an organization: novice, casual, business analysts, and power users.

Therefore, the types of possible information delivery methods are as follows: online, intranet, internet, and email (Ponniah, 2010). For power users, for instance, these users “want to be able to navigate throughout the data warehouse, pick-up interesting data, format his or her own queries, drill through the data layers, and create custom reports and ad hoc queries” (Ponniah, 2010, p. 40). As such, these power users usually seek complex information, multidimensional (MD) analysis, and statistical analysis which could be facilitated through the online, intranet, internet, as the use of emails.

What kind of details are to be gathered in the requirements definition phase? As learned from Ponniah (2010), the “primary goal in the requirements definition phase is to compile information packages for all the subjects for the data warehouse” (p. 105). The kinds of requirements that one needs to gather at the requirements definition phase are categorized as follows: “Data elements: fact classes, dimensions;Recording of data in terms of time;Data extracts from source systems;Business rules: attributes, ranges, domains, operational records” (Ponniah, 2010, p. 109).The gathering of information during this phase could be solicited through three (3) primary means or basic techniques: interviews, joint application development (JAD) sessions, and through questionnaires (Ponniah, 2010).

Thus, the kind of details to be gathered would depend on the needs and demands of the users in the organizations. Through the use of the basic techniques for gathering information, as the query tools specialist, one must be able to comprehensively assess and determine the informational requirements of each user according to the category of requirements as stipulated above. Likewise, the types of questions that should be designed and communicated to the users should be structured in the most effective manner to facilitate solicitation of the appropriate response.

Concurrently, it was also learned that aside from utilizing these three (3) basic techniques for data gathering and collection, one could gather useful information through the evaluation of existing documentation (Ponniah, 2010). As emphasized, “review of existing documentation can be done by the project team without too much involvement from the users of the business units. Scheduling of the review of existing documentation involves only the members of the project team” (Ponniah, 2010, pp. 115-116). Overall, as the query tools specialist, one should be able to focus on the needs of the users to determine the extensiveness and comprehensiveness of the information required during the requirements definition phase.

As such, using basic techniques for gathering information, one would be able to facilitate collection of the needed data within the stipulated time frame.ReferencePonniah, P. (2010). Data Warehousing Fundamentals for it Professionals. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.