Data Warehouse strategy road map studies

This is a comprehensive study to suggest a Data Warehousing architectural blueprint and a strategy roadmap. The Data Warehouse strategy road map study combines our offerings on needs analysis and requirements study and solution architecting and goes well beyond that to suggest a comprehensive implementation blueprint, which takes into account future Data Warehouse technology directions and trends.

The Data Warehouse strategy road map study will specifically address the following issues:

• Competitive dynamics and information needs
• Identification and prioritization of subject areas
• Suggesting any modification in the existing architecture
• Phase-wise rollout strategy
• Geographical rollout strategy
• Data acquisition strategy
• Information delivery strategy
• Change management strategy
• Maintenance strategy

Deliverables

The end result would be a Data Warehouse strategy road map document. This will include a detailed implementation blueprint containing:

• Phase-wise implementation approach for the Data Marts / EDW
• Effort estimates for the proposed solution
• Time frame for the proposed solution

Customization, implementation and integration

Deployment of a Data Warehousing solution starts off after the user’s analytical and operational reporting requirements and other information needs have been frozen. The Data Warehouse group has Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) specialists, Data Modelers, On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) specialists and Data Quality experts to successfully deploy a Data Warehousing solution.

The Data Warehouse group has its own proprietary methodology for deployment of the Data Warehousing solution. Typically, the customization/implementation/integration process involves four phases:

• The requirements study phase
• The design phase
• The development phase
• The deployment phase

The results of the requirements study phase serve as the key input for the design phase. The Data Warehouse group applies the onsite-offshore model for executing most of its projects to deliver more value to its customers.

The following matrix maps our typical Data Warehouse life-cycle activities into the onsite-offshore model:

The design phase

The development phase

The deployment phase

Deliverables

The end result would be the complete solution, which satisfies all user requirements. Specifically, the output of this offering will be in the form of the following:

• Business requirements analysis document
• High level design document
• Low level design document
• Test data (if required)
• Unit test plan
• System test plan
• Release document
• User Acceptance Test (UAT) plans
• Prototype and installation report
• Implementation report
• Acceptance report

Operations/Maintenance

TThe Data Warehouse group offers its customers to undertake all the activities, which sustains and runs the Data Warehousing solution, in addition to taking up solution enhancements and fine-tuning of the solution deployed.

Typically, the operations/maintenance offering will involve:

• Execution of work requests, which includes bug-fixing, solution enhancements etc.
• Product maintenance
• Production support, which includes
• Reverse engineering
• Re-engineering
• Conversion/migration/porting
• Developing GUIs

We have a well-defined maintenance methodology to take care of the operations/maintenance project life cycle. Our operations/maintenance processes include the following components:

• Project planning
• Tailoring the project’s technical processes
• Tailoring the project’s management processes
• Configuration management
• Parallel maintenance
• Quality assurance reviews
• Environment management (for hardware and software)
• Escalation process
• Project monitoring and tracking
• Project scheduling and tracking
• Executing work requests
• Training
• Data collection and metrics analysis
• Revalidating the project plan

Deliverables

The deliverable would depend on the specific work request from the customer.

Migration

The DW and BI group has experience in doing migration projects for global clients on different platforms. We also have well defined, time-tested methodologies to carry out this task.

Our typical migration process involves the following steps:

• Study of the client’s infrastructure in terms of database and applications which requires migration
• Study of the databases in terms of source data, data volumes, types of conversions required and so on
• High level design
• Assessment of data quality
• Assessment of the cleansing work involved
• Identification of data conversion functionality
• Data mapping
• Detailed design documentation of the following aspects
• Collisions on codes, descriptions, system generated unique identifiers
• Duplicate transactions
• Sparsely populated legacy structures
• Integrity violations
• Default values
• Coding and unit testing for detection of errors
• Integration and testing for testing of each modules and other interdependencies
• Systems testing
• Acceptance testing

Deliverables

The end result would be a completed migrated system in to a new environment as per the user requirements and specifications.

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