Day: 1 September 2010

The board of a large organisation appoints a CIO who delegates technical decisions to his employees. In the Enterprise Architecture (EA) department, an expert on Business Intelligence (BI) decides that the strategy for this company is to have a single Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). This makes sense, because experience has shown that in the long run, it is cheaper and more efficient to build one Data Warehouse, rather than start by building "islands" and then later try to merge them together. In the mean time, some business people working for the company have rallied the budget holders, and started a project to build a new online sales application. They need to generate some reports based on the sales from this application, in order to set themselves targets and measure their performance. But, they are not experts when it comes to reporting. The business sector at which their application is aimed is cutting edge and brand new, so they don't know what to expect, they don't really know what kind of reports they will need, and they will certainly need to adapt to the market very quickly. A project team in the IT department then get the assignment to build the application, including the report generation. Also knowing little about reporting, they start talking to EA, who set up a meeting, between themselves, the development team, some people from the Quality Assurance (QA) department and some experts from the BI team. Hours of discussion later, they have made the following conclusions:…

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