Time marches on and soon the collective retirement of the Kimball Group will be upon us. At the end of 2015 we will all retire. In my final Design Tip, I would like to share the perspective for DW/BI success I’ve gained from my 26 years in the data warehouse/business intelligence industry. While data warehousing […]

For my final Design Tip, I’m returning to a fundamental theme that’s not rocket science, but too often ignored: business-IT collaboration. If you buy into the proposition that the true measure of DW/BI success is business acceptance of the deliverables to improve their decision-making, then buying into the importance of collaboration should be easy. Achieving […]

Over the years, we’ve worked with countless exemplary DW/BI project team members: smart, skilled, dedicated, and motivated, coupled with a healthy dose of mutual trust, respect, and camaraderie with their teammates. Teams with members who possess these characteristics tend to fire on all cylinders, with the resulting whole often greater than the sum of the […]

Many organizations are embracing agile development techniques for their DW/BI implementations. While we strongly concur with agile’s focus on business collaboration to deliver value via incremental initiatives, we’ve also witnessed agile’s “dark side.” Some teams get myopically focused on a narrowly-defined set of business requirements. They extract a limited amount of source data to develop […]

A data warehouse / business intelligence system is challenging to test. Standard testing methodology tests one little thing at a time, but a DW/BI system is all about integration and complexity, not to mention large data volumes. Here are my top five recommendations for building and executing a testing environment for your DW/BI project. 1. […]

A student in a recent Data Warehouse Lifecycle in Depth class asked me for an overview of the Kimball Lifecycle approach to share with their manager. Confident that we’d published an executive summary, I was happy to oblige. Much to my surprise, our only published Lifecycle overview was a chapter in a Toolkit book, so this Design Tip […]