Discuss the activities associated with initiating an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) project.

What will be an ideal response?

To begin a data warehouse project, we need answers for questions such as: which user
requirements are most important and which data should be considered first? Also, should the
project be scaled down into something more manageable, yet at the same time provide an
infrastructure capable of ultimately delivering a full-scale enterprise-wide data warehouse?
The requirements collection and analysis stage of an EDW project involves interviewing
appropriate members of staff such as marketing users, finance users, sales users, operational
users, and management to enable the identification of a prioritized set of requirements for the
enterprise that the data warehouse must meet. At the same time, interviews are conducted with
members of staff responsible for OLTP systems to identify, which data sources can provide
clean, valid, and consistent data that will remain supported over the next few years.
The interviews provide the necessary information for the top-down view (user requirements)
and the bottom-up view (which data sources are available) of the EDW.