Chapter 6. Analyzing the Requirements

Business requirements in a business intelligence and data warehouse project can be very high level and vague. Gaining an understanding of the business processes and persistence of data can help considerably in obtaining and decomposing valued business requirements. The following recipes help in obtaining, categorizing, and prioritizing requirements:

• Decomposing the reports and requirements

• Defining the business rules

• Categorizing the requirements by business drivers

• Prioritizing the requirements

• Adding hierarchies to your semantic data model

• Adding metrics to your semantic data model

• Defining your data dictionary

• Defining your security requirements

• Defining your data retention requirements

Introduction

Once the blueprint is complete and prioritized, it is time to start the detailed requirement gathering. Requirements can be vague and limited in a business intelligence and data warehousing project. It is important to align the information collected during requirement...