Building an agile data warehouse: A proactive approach to managing changes

Data warehouses (DWs) must be agile and continuously evolve to meet changing business needs. While change management in DW is frequently discussed in the literature, such discussion is usually fragmented. Furthermore, the traditional approach to managing changes in DW is primarily reactive in nature, that is, after a business change has already occurred, the data warehouse is updated, remodeled, and reconfigured to reflect such a change. While such an approach may keep the data warehouse relatively current, obsolesce of the data, even in terms of a short period of time, remains a problem, which makes decisions based on the DW ineffective. To make a DW more accurate, current, and agile, proactive strategies on the planning, design, implementation, and use of a DW system should be pursued to reduce future service disruptions due to changes. This paper proposes a proactive approach, in which proactive measures are employed in different system development life cycle (SDLC) phases of a data warehousing project to manage and control negative impacts of changes. The paper has also discussed the implications of the proactive approach and agile methodology on the software industry as well as on firms that use DWs.