The Role of the Director of Data Management or Director of BI and Data Warehousing.

Any BI and Data Warehouse design and implementation requires the collaboration of several functional groups within IT, after spending several months documenting the requirements of business users. However the real challenges usually begin to occur after the implementation when you begin to deploy in production and start supporting a growing number of users. It is a fallacy and in the long run disastrous to consider that the Warehouse will remain the same once it is deployed. In reality, the way the Business users use the system will continually change and requires every one of the functional groups to be in lock step with the evolution of the BI and Data Warehouse deployment to ensure optimal performance and control support costs.

In this multi-part series I am going to address the role of each functional group and what information would each need to ensure that a BI and Data Warehouse deployment is managed efficiently and cost effectively.

So lets take a look at a typical IT team that is responsible for the integrated delivery of BI applications and Data Warehouse for a department within an enterprise or across the enterprise (as a shared environment).

A business unit or departmental team is led by a Director of Data Management or
Director of BI and/or Data Warehousing who has oversight over the IT team responsible for the integrated delivery the Data Warehouse – including ETL, BI Applications and the Data Warehouse databases.

The Director of Data Management or Director of BI and/or Data Warehousing manages a team responsible for the design, implementation and support of the integrated system. This team typically includes:

• Application Managers/Developers

• Data warehouse Architects/Developers

• Application DBAs (not to be confused with System DBAs)

• ETL Developers and Data Architects

• System DBAs (most likely a shared resource from the database infrastructure IT team)

I will discuss each role in detail in this multi-part series.

Lets start with the Director of Data Management (or BI and Data Warehousing). What are their key objectives and need in managing an enterprise BI and DW deployment? And what kind of information is needed to help them be successful?

Since this individual has oversight over the IT team responsible for the integrated delivery the Data Warehouse, including ETL, BI Applications and the Data Warehouse databases, the major goals for a Director typically are:

• Control operational and support costs while meeting the growing needs of the business

• Communicate effectively with his/her managers to justify current investments and request funding and plan for future growth (people and capacity)

• Ensure that any corporate security and regulatory compliance requirements are met (if required)

More often than not there is not enough information available to assist in meeting these goals effectively. The kind of information that Director level managers need to ensure they have readily available are:

• What are the weekly and monthly trends on user activity and utilization?

• How are we doing with meeting our internal SLAs? What is the trend in activity that is not meeting our internal goals of performance?

• Do we have information to meet our Audit requirements (who is using what data and when)?

• What resources should be plan for based on trend in activity – add capacity, more people etc.?

This type of information is not any different to what business users regularly leverage their BI applications to make informed decisions.

Except that the data is related to IT performance metrics.

In my next blog I will discuss the role of the Application Managers/Developers in managing a BI and Data Warehouse deployment.

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