Database and Data Warehousing Design

Section 1: Business Requirements Document

Patrick B. Magee

Information Systems Capstone (CIS-499)

Mark O’Connell, Professor

February 1, 2015

Alpha Company is organizations were I am currently the Chief Information Officer. An organization in the business of data collection and analysis and has been in the business for the last two years. This paper documents the business requirements for a project plan that aims at creating a repository for the collected data beyond standard relational databases. The company’s data warehouse capacity is currently 10 terabyte and the capacity is expected to grow by a margin of 20% every year. There comes the need for the Company to plan for its information technology infrastructure which should be well implemented for the Company to be able to cope with this large growth of data. This report therefore aims at defining information technology infrastructure that is cost manageable, efficient, and effective for the organization.

Scope control is apprehensive of the factors that contribute to scope changes and therefore aims at ensuring that the scope changes are positive. Scope control determines whether the scope change has taken place and manages the changes in the case that they occur. For scope control to succeed, it must be systematically incorporated with other control processes which include time control, risk control, and quality control (Martin, 2008). The aspect of scope control is generally made up of measuring the extent into which development towards goals and objectives is being accomplished, the evaluation of the possible reactions to any deviations, as well as the correcting any hostile trends. The scope for this project should be controlled through the following three tips:

· Through making sure that the project team, the stakeholders, the business leaders, as well as everybody else involved understand the scope of the project. This can be achieved through keeping on reinforcing what it is throughout the project life cycle.

· The second tip involves making sure that the project team understands how to identify a scope change when they see it and to be able to answer appropriately and correctly back to the business users. This means they should be able to answer all queries relating to every single instant of the project. They should not answer questions with NO but try to find solutions for different issues regarding the project and bring back the best results to the project manager.

· The third tip is communication, which involves managing the communications of the project through managing the expectations of what the project is going to deliver in terms of scope; this is an important part of the project plan. This also involves making sure that there is continuous communication and there is an effective communications plan to manage scope changes.

There are various risks that exist within the implementation and deployment of this project which may include the following:

· The lack of awareness for security policy in the user domain; this risk emerge from intentional malicious activities within the workstation domain through unauthorized user access.

· Weakness in installed software and malicious software introduces vulnerabilities.

· Unauthorized network access, transmitting private data which is unencrypted, or spreading malicious software.

· Exposure and unauthorized access of internal resources to the public, which may lead to loss of productivity due to internet access, denial of service attacks, or brute-force attacks on the organizational network infrastructure.

The project should therefore have well defined constraints in terms of who has access to what resources; for example the database administrator should have different login credentials from other users. Assumptions in this case are that the data collected is of both of qualitative and quantitative measures.

Data warehousing involves the process of designing how data is stored for the goal of improving reporting and analysis (Sinha, 2011). Data warehouse specialists ensure that various stores of data are related and connected to each other both physically as well as conceptually. An organization’s data is usually stored across a number of databases. In order to be able to analyze the broadest range of data, each of the databases needs to be connected in some way. This implies that the data within them need a way of being related to other relevant data and that the physical databases themselves have a connection so their data can be viewed at together for reporting and analysis purposes.

Data analytics can be utilized to examine whether a database is working as projected. With the information acquired from the analytics, the database administrators can establish which areas of the warehousing are accepted and which areas of their site are not accepted by the users. Analytics therefore enables the database designer to improve the user experience; analytics is a core aspect of this project implementation and adoption (Ohlhorst, 2013). Interfaces and cloud computing are key to the company growth due to the rapid involving technological world. The virtualization of databases through cloud computing is a key concept since it enhances security by avoiding system failure and improved disaster recovery techniques.

Outsourcing and off-shoring needs potentially offer greater and wider benefits. Complex strategies in this project can be outsourced. Virtualization technologies such as cloud computing and security issues which are core in the project can be outsourced. Security is a major part of this project since failure to implement good security measures would mean that the company will not grow as speculated and therefore lowering its competitive edge. Therefore the project plan should lay down the security measures to be implemented so that the Wiggly Corporation can implement a secure database system.

The necessary resources for this project include analytics software for collecting the relevant data, database management system for managing the databases, and knowledgeable staff to manage key dockets of the project management. The staff members may include Chief Technology Officer (CTO) who is responsible for ensuring the throughput, speed, accuracy, availability, and reliability of the relational databases and Chief Security Officer (CSO) who is responsible for ensuring the security of the database.

Terms that will be used throughout the project include the following:

Project Goal – This is the objective of the Project.

Project scope – This involves defining the activities that are involved so as to achieve the project goal.

The risk assessment - Defined in terms of probability of project occurrence and the negative cost impact of project outcomes.

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) – This involves breaking down the project activities so as to plan for time and other resources.

Functional Point Analysis (FPA) – This would be extremely useful in managing the change of scope of the project, communicating functional requirements, as well as measuring productivity.

References

Bentley, C. (2009). Computer project management. London: Heyden.

Sinha, A. K. (2011). Data warehousing. Indianapolis, IN: Prompt Publications.

Martin, P. K., & Tate, K. (2008). Getting started in project management. New York: Wiley.

Ohlhorst, F. (2013). Big data analytics: Turning big data into big money. Hoboken, N.J: John

Wiley & Sons.