Chapter Fifteen. Step 15: Implementation

Chapter Overview

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Things to consider about implementation of BI applications

• The two types of security implementations : centralized security and decentralized security

• How to perform a security gap analysis

• The three types of backup procedures: incremental backup, high-speed mainframe backup, and partial backup

• Monitoring the utilization of computer, network, and personnel resources

• Managing growth in data, growth in usage, and growth in hardware

• Brief descriptions of the activities involved in implementation, the deliverables resulting from those activities, and the roles involved

• The risks of not performing Step 15

Things to Consider

Preparing for Production

Have we defined all the production libraries and production databases?

Are the daily, weekly, and monthly extract/transform/load (ETL) processes on the job scheduler?

Are the regularly scheduled application report programs on the job scheduler?

Are the regularly scheduled meta data repository programs on the job scheduler?

Is the operations staff ready to take over?

Have they approved the quality assurance (QA) test results? Do they have any concerns?

Do we have to write operating procedures for the operations staff? For all components of the BI application? Or just for the ETL process?

When will we copy all programs into the production libraries?

When will we load the production databases?

Security Considerations

What types of security measures do we need? What are we securing?

How are we securing the data? The applications? The tools? The interfaces?

Do the security measures have to include encryption and decryption, especially for the Web-enabled access and analysis portion of the BI application?

Are single- user authentication services of an enterprise information portal part of this BI application?

Database Maintenance

What is our backup and recovery procedure?

What is our disaster recovery procedure?

How will database performance monitoring take place? What tools will be used? Who is responsible for monitoring the databases?

How will we know if we have met the service-level agreement (SLA) for performance?

How will we monitor growth in usage and growth in data volume?

Training and Support

Have the business people received training on using the BI application?

Have the business people received training on using the meta data repository?

Have the "power users" received training on writing efficient queries in Structured Query Language (SQL)?

Is the help desk staff geared up to mentor the business people in their use of the BI application, including the meta data repository?

Has the help desk staff received sufficient training?

If there is no help desk, who will support the business people?

Now that the BI application is built and tested , it is ready to be implemented in the production environment. You can roll out the new BI application in two ways, all at once as is done traditionally or in increments as briefly described in the section below.