Data Warehouse Failures

By Zarif Rahman

Why failure
Chosen of data model.
Complexity of data model initial

Management support
Lack of high level support on the project

Technology
New technology used. No skill and knowledge to use

Time
Time constraint in order to complete the project

Project not cost justified

Organization should justify the cost of the DW project. It should includes an evaluation of both cost and benefits. The actual costs may have been much higher than estimated costs

Why failure
Data not reliable Data to be used are not captured on the data warehouse Communication Lack of communication among team member to gather the bussines or technical requirement

Leadership
Lack of leadership to take a lead of the project Business user commitment and knowledge

Lack of knowledge or commitment from the business team who should provide the business requirement
Political Pressure Political pressure to used the data early than project timeline

Why failure
IT initiate DW project
When IT department proposed to the business about the technology of DW, they will focus on the technology rather than the business requirement.

Metadata management
Unclear of metadata to describe the data.

Database schema flaws

Quality of data depends on data quality, quality of application program and quality of database schema. If DB schema has flaws, then information provided by DW will be flaws.

Deliverable of DW system
Too complicated for users to use the system. They will use their traditional way to find the data

Quality of feeder system

Flaws of feeder system will make the information provided by DW flaws. The feeder data should capable enough to handle the process in term of performance and availability

How to avoid DW failure

Top management sponsorship and support
Sponsorship and support from the top management of the organization is very important. A Clear requirement comes from the top management. They know what information is needed to the organization.

Clearly defining roles

Each user or department should know their own role on the project. This is to ensure who are responsible to prepare the requirement of data to the project team.

Concerted Effort

Top management and senior management should plan the project roadmap. They will assign the roles to each department. Also to make sure department pay their own roles to ensure the project success

How to avoid DW failure

Cleaning Data Data quality is the an issue in data warehouse and it always exist in an applications. Data quality solution should be implemented at the beginning even before the data warehouse project started. Another way is to clean the data as the project goes along. Also, a tool or application can help to detect the data error and alert users to clean the data.

Metadata Management

Metadata is information about data. It facilitate the understanding the data. It helps for data integration and enable business to locate, understand and use the data once it loaded into the DW

Database Schema

Database schema should be flawless in term of consistent, integrity and compliance to the rules before DW warehouse project initiated.

Conclusion
There are many ways for the DW projects to fail. Organization should understand the factors those affect to the DW project success By knowing the factors, organization can try to avoid those factor and DW will be success.

References
International Journal of Latest Trends in Computing. (2010). The Empirical Study on the Factors Affecting Data Warehousing Success. Dhaka, Md. Ruhul