8 BI/DW Pitfalls adapted from Rapheus A BI/DW expert

1.     Insufficient User’s Involvement

·         IT departments sometimes try to run Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence projects in a vacuum. DW/BI projects are not IT projects! They are rather initiated by and addressed to Business Users.

·         Lack of user involvement typically leads to either solutions that are too hard to use or constructs that do not solve any business problems.

2.     Enterprise Warehouse at Start

·         Some companies attempt to begin by building an enterprise warehouse.  It is hard to bite, chew and swallow a very risky endeavor. Adding more team-members does not help: Data Warehouse projects do not scale well.

·         Enterprise warehouses have slow ROI, cost a lot of money and, therefore, usually end in disaster.

·         Painful lessons learned are more difficult to implement.

3.     Poor Data Quality

·         The Data Warehouse, perhaps, is the best way to discover (and report) “noisy” data.

·         Most “bad” data is easy to spot but some can slither into the Data Warehouse.

·         Fixing data in the Data Warehouse does nothing to stop new bad data coming from the source.

4.     Deficient Funding

·         Even when starting with a small Data Mart, money is always an issue.

·         Warehousing projects often fail to subsidize all aspects, including hardware and training.

·         Data cleanup always takes longer than expected and will dissolve a significant part of the budget.

5.     Corporate Jungle

·         Power struggles in the organization may occur over the resources involved in the project or the vision and focus of the warehouse, to name a few.

·         Certain people may feel threatened by the outcome of warehousing projects.

·         Some folks claim they own certain data and no one else is going to use it.

6.     Incorrect or Partial KPIs

·         Even simple cubes may not contain valuable information. E.g., a cube that contains sales information is useless when trying to analyze sales reps’ performance.

·         Warehouses that are built by IT often include just the existing data and not the KPIs needed.

·         A lack of proper KPIs means that the warehouse falls short of solving a business