Business Question Assessment

Once a Business Case has been developed, the short-term strategy for implementing the Data Warehouse is mapped out by means of the Business Question Assessment (BQA) stage. The purpose of BQA is to:

- Establish the scope of the Warehouse and its intended use

- Define and prioritize the business requirements and the subsequent information (data) needs the Warehouse will address

- Identify the business directions and objectives that may influence the required data and application architectures

- Determine which business subject areas provide the most needed information; prioritize and sequence implementation projects accordingly

- Drive out the logical data model that will direct the physical implementation model

- Measure the quality, availability, and related costs of needed source data at a high level

- Define the iterative population projects based on business needs and data validation

The prioritized predator value stream or most important strategic initiative is analyzed to determine the specific business questions that need to be answered through a Warehouse implementation. Each business question is assessed to determine its overall importance to the organization, and a high-level analysis of the data needed to provide the answers is undertaken.

The data is assessed for quality, availability, and cost associated with bringing it into the Data Warehouse. The business questions are then revisited and prioritized based upon their relative importance and the cost and feasibility of acquiring the associated data.

The prioritized list of business questions is used to determine the scope of the first and subsequent iterations of the Data Warehouse, in the form of population projects. Iteration scoping is dependent on source data acquisition issues and is guided by determining how many business questions can be answered in a three to six month implementation time frame.

A "business question" is a question deemed by the business to provide useful information in determining strategic direction. A business question can be answered through objective analysis of the data that is available.