End Users

The end users are who you are designing and building the data warehouse for ?your customers. They rely on the information they extract from the warehouse in order to work more effectively and efficiently. They also ultimately determine whether or not your data warehouse project met its stated goals. For these reasons, your project must be built around providing the end users with the information they need in a user- friendly fashion.

The primary end users for data warehouse information are report recipients and query designers. They provide the results of their work to the decision makers who determine the course of your organization.

Report Recipients

Report recipients are the end users most dependent upon the information extracted from the data warehouse. They include business analysts, financial analysts, mid-level managers, senior managers and executives. Although some of the report recipients will have participated in the design process, they will have different perspectives as end users. They will have the greatest interests in report content format and requirements, time frame and update frequency, ad hoc query capabilities and drill down/drill through requirements.

Report content and format requirements define what information is presented and arranged. Your end users will each have a special perspective on what information is important in the periodic reports they rely on. Many times they will need similar source data, but the reports will contain different calculated values and extrapolations. Even when they agree on what information must be present, they each have a different set of requirements when it comes to how the information is arranged. Each of these views must be taken into consideration when defining your project requirements.

Query Designers

Query designers are technically competent people who are tasked with building the queries that provide the reports. They have to please the report recipients while working under those limitations imposed by the structure and content of the data warehouse.

The query designers are a valuable resource in the same areas as those represented by the report recipients, but from a different perspective. They frequently ask you to include calculated columns the report recipients don抰 know are necessary. They also ask for simpler structure in many areas, so as to make their query designs more manageable and also demand highly denormalized tables wherever possible.

Management

Management will typically provide the most demanding and least detailed set of requirements from the data warehouse project. You can expect such requests as, "I need to know how profitable we are on a quarterly basis." or "Who are our top 100 customers?" You will then have to work to define profitability and top customer in terms that can be applied to the data warehouse.

Management requirements usually fall into three general categories: strategic reporting and projections, tactical reporting and enterprise standards compliance.

Strategic Reporting and Projections

Strategic reporting and projection are long term processes aimed at positioning the organization to remain competitive in the marketplace. Strategy is defined as a plan designed to place an organization in an advantageous position prior to competition. From this we can see that the information needed to support strategic initiatives concerns long-term trend and market penetration analysis, long-term raw material inventory availability and usage, changes in the technical environment, work force projections and customer demographic information. Each management team will have its own list of specific information they need in order to help them formulate or adjust the corporate strategy.

Tactical Reporting

Tactical reporting deals with understanding how day-to-day operations are meeting