Program Initiation
Data warehousing is not a one time effort.  Instead, data warehousing is an ongoing process involving multiple projects.  To maximize the value of the warehousing effort, it is important that some standardization and process be placed around the body of work.  Some of the items included in a program charter should include:

• Project Standardization - Creating a management approved project template to use as a starting point on current and future projects helps to insure quality and consistency across the overall warehouse.
• Project Incrementation - Listing proposed projects can help to define scope of implementation and included systems as well as provide an opportunity to prioritize projects falling in the intersection of relative ease of implementation and overall value.
• Data Governance - Standardization is one of the main value propositions of a data warehouse.  The governance board plays a key role in this challenge in developing an enterprise data dictionary, glossary of corporate terminology, dispute resolution, and others.
• Readiness Assessment - A critical step in any program initiation is determining the readiness of a source application, business unit, or enterprise for data warehouse integration.

Data Acquisition Processes -extract, transform, load (ETL)
The data acquisition process is central to the data warehousing effort including such items as sourcing, consolidation, cleansing, transforming, and aggregating leveraging a hand-coded, platform solution, or commercial product.  The selected approach is an important one as there is not typically a migration path between the different approaches.  The approach should take into account various factors including budget, source connectivity requirements (RDBMS, file-based, mainframe, etc) scalability and flexibility.

Data Repositories
Decision Source is experienced in creating a variety of architectures and functional repositories.  These include operational data stores, data marts, relational warehouses, OLAP cubes, and other process specific structures.  We work with our clients to determine the best fit to support any business process or decision support requirement.

Information Delivery
Data warehouses should be constructed to support efficient data retrieval, but not all questions or users are best suited by direct query.  Decision Source can help you determine the optimal delivery mechanisms for your new high-performance warehouse through either custom solutions or best of breed tool implementation. 

Please visit our business intelligence solutions page for more details on information delivery.

Warehouse Administration
As your warehouse grows, administration of the environment takes on a more important role in maintaining the performance, availability, and ultimately, return on investment.  We can work with your internal staff to monitor and maintain such items as query performance, user analysis, auditing, and tuning to help clients better measure the ongoing success  of the data warehouse.