Lack of User Commitment

Hi, I am very positive that my question has been asked a million time in this forum. Therefore, I want to apologize in advance. Currently, I am working on a data warehouse project that literally has no user commitment. This project exists because IT feels the end-users need a data warehouse. In other words, IT drives the development effort. From Kimball's books, it is a disaster waiting to happen. I tried to convince the upper management but no one listen because I am relatively young in my career. I simply follow Kimball's advice and text book approach.

What is the best way to convey the message to these folks that they are heading down the wrong path? The philosophy of the team is that "we build it and they will come".

Make sure what you build outshines the current reporting and all will be well. Enjoy the opportunity to build a Kimball data warehouse. All companies do this, so don't sweat the small stuff.

I agree with B&L. Use this as your opportunity to create. It is the exact way I have got my start. Instead of re-creating an excel report, I took it upon myself to use dimensional modeling and give the department something more useful than an automated report. It took almost a year after that was finished to get upper-management to realize that dimensional modeling into a Data Warehouse was the proper direction because of the analytical capabilities that are now more easily presenting themselves.

We are now about 9 months into our full scale DW/BI project. I have more requests for business processes to be added than I know what to do with. Team of one hoping to get approval for more next budget year. In other words, keep using the Kimball methodology and create the best DW/BI system you can with the limited data and business involvement you can get.

BoxesAndLines wrote:Make sure what you build outshines the current reporting and all will be well. Enjoy the opportunity to build a Kimball data warehouse. All companies do this, so don't sweat the small stuff.

I've been in many situations where the Data Warehouse effort is driven and sponsored by the business. So, 'all' companies do not treat a DW as an IT only effort.

While I agree with the comments that it is great to get the experience of building a DW, don't think that building the perfect solution will cause the business to use it. From a professional standpoint, make sure your superiors understand and appreciate what you are doing AND are actively involved in the feature decisions so you are not hung out to dry should the business ignore the result.

Data warehousing is not about building a 'field of dreams'.