Chapter Four. Step 4: Project Requirements Definition


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Chapter Overview

This chapter covers the following topics:

  • Things to consider when defining requirements

  • The differences between general business requirements and project-specific requirements

  • The appropriate people to interview to determine general business requirements

  • The sections to complete in a business requirements report

  • The appropriate people to interview when gathering project-specific requirements for a BI application

  • The sections to include in an application requirements document

  • Interviewing considerations and interviewing tips

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

  • The risks of not performing Step 4

Things to Consider

Functional Requirements

What types of information do the business people in our organization need? What types of business questions are they unable to answer today and why?

What reports do they want?

Which reports are most important? Which are least important? Which reports can be replaced with "canned" queries?

What types of queries will the business analysts run?

Who will administer the query libraries and set up the universes, for example, data views in online analytical processing (OLAP) tools?

Are the business analysts and knowledge workers planning to write many ad hoc queries? Can we get some samples of old queries from them?

Data Requirements

What data do the business people need? Where do they get that data today?

How clean is the data today? How clean does it have to be?

What data is considered most critical to the business?

Can the data be summarized? If yes, by what dimensions?

Will the business analysts want the capability to drill down to the detail? How granular does the detail have to be?

Do other business people need the same data? Do we know who they are? Will they be available to validate the meta data?

What are the expectations for the timeliness of the data and the availability of the data?

Historical Requirements

How many years of history do we need to keep?

Can we start collecting history from this point forward or do we have to load data from old archived files?

Security Requirements

How secure does the data have to be? What type of security exists on the operational source data?

Are the security requirements homogeneous (should all the data have the same level of security)?

Who should have access to the data?

Performance Requirements

What is the slowest response time the business people will accept for a query?

Can reports be run overnight rather than during the day in order to avoid resource contention with interactive usage of the BI target databases?

How often and for how long will knowledge workers and business analysts access the BI target databases during the day for ad hoc reporting and data analysis?

Requirements come in two flavors: (1) general high-level business requirements for the BI decision-support environment, which are identified at the onset of a BI initiative and are periodically reviewed, and (2) project-specific requirements, which concentrate on the detailed deliverables expected from each BI application release. Table 4.1 lists the differences between the two types of requirements.

Table 4.1. General Business Requirements versus Project-Specific Requirements
 

General Business Requirements

Project-Specific Requirements

Purpose

  • Determine the general business needs of the organization for a BI decision-support environment

  • Define the specific functions and data to be delivered at the end of a BI project

Interviewees

  • Business executives

  • Information technology (IT) managers

  • IT staff

  • Line-of-business managers

  • Subject matter experts

  • Business sponsor

  • Business representative

  • "Power users"

  • Stakeholders (knowledge workers, business analysts, data owners )

  • Subject matter experts

Deliverable

  • Business requirements report

  • Application requirements document

Content of deliverable

  • Findings

  • Issues

  • Opportunities

  • Recommendations

  • Next steps

  • Functional requirements

  • Data requirements

  • Data-cleansing requirements

  • Security requirements

  • Performance requirements

  • Availability requirements



Business Intelligence Roadmap
Business Intelligence Roadmap: The Complete Project Lifecycle for Decision-Support Applications
ISBN: 0201784203
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 202

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