Eight studies of data warehousing failures are presented. They were written based on interviews with people who were associated with the projects. The extent of the failure varies with the organization, but in all cases, the project was at least a disappointment.
Read the case and prepare two page discussion of the following:
1. What’s the scope of what can be considered a data warehousing failure? Discuss.
2. What do you find the most interesting in the failure stories?
3. Do they provide any insights about how a failure might be avoided?
4. Analysis of Case
Case Studies of Data Warehousing Failures
North American Federal Government
A real-estate and property management unit in the North American Federal Government initiated and co-sponsored a data warehouse with the IT department. The IT department wrote a formal proposal. In it, an architectural plan was specified, costs were estimated at $800,000, the project’s duration was estimated to be eight months, and the responsibility for funding and manpower was defined as the business unit’s. The IT department never heard if the proposal was accepted but proceeded with the project assuming that there had been no problems with the proposal.
The project actually exceeded its eight-month schedule and lasted almost two years. Several factors contributed to the extra time. One was that the business unit stretched the detailed data analysis from one and a half months to nine months. Another was that the business unit kept expanding the planned user base. Over a six-month period, the number of planned users grew from 200 to 2,500. Also, to acquire the right technology for this project, a formal approval process of the Federal government took almost a year. Three weeks prior to technical delivery, the project was canceled by the IT director. The rationale was that the business unit was actually several months away from accepting deliver. Yet, six weeks after cancellation, a new interest in populating the warehouse emerged, but in the end, nothing was ever delivered and this failed endeavor cost the organization approximately $2.5 million.
There were three main reasons for the failure of this data warehouse project. One was lack of focus. The business unit had a difficult time identifying the scope of the project. It provided an information architecture and data framework but the details were defined very loosely. Also, the business unit kept pushing back the milestone dates which gave the impression that the project was neither urgent nor important.
Internal politics was another driving force behind this data warehouse disappointment. First, the business unit leader prevented analysts on the project from talking to the ultimate end users, but the reason
was uncertain. Second, the business unit leader would go over the IT project leader’ head and reassign staff to different tasks without informing the IT project leader. This further led to ambiguity as to what was to be accomplished and when. In the end, it was believed that the cancellation of the project was primarily because the IT director feared supporting a data warehouse. Staff and funding had recently been cut, and such an endeavor would further drain IT resources.
In hindsight, the IT project leader would have done two things differently. First, he would not have allowed the politics and overriding of authority to prevent inopportune and incorrect decisions as well as lack of direction. Second, the original plan for this data warehouse was to build a warehouse framework with a common language and then spin off subject area data from it. The manager believes that a better approach would have been to start with data marts and them work toward a full-blown data warehouse.