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? |