Deploying the business case to reduce the risk of large scale data warehousing

Managers of large data warehousing projects often put project failure down to organizational resistance. Technical requirements are usually not considered to be crucial for project success. However, the majority of the scientific work on data warehousing concentrates on technical aspects. As a consequence, a comprehensive framework or method for the introduction of a data warehouse is still missing. This paper takes this contradiction into account and deals with the management of organizational risks in large scale data warehouse projects. We base our research on information gathered from large organizations which develop and/or run data warehouses. This paper is structured as follows: After a short introduction the planning process of data warehousing is outlined. The first step is the strategic decision for data warehousing which is followed by the definition and evaluation of the initial project which is also called first increment. In the third section we present a business case strategy for both the initial project and subsequent data mart projects. Furthermore, the interdependencies between the initial phase and subsequent projects are discussed.