| | |  | Manager's Guides to Computing | Home » » » A Manager's Guide to Data Warehousing | | | | | | | Product Promotions: | | | | | Description: | | Aimed at helping business and IT managers clearly communicate with each other, this helpful book addresses concerns straight-on and provides practical methods to building a collaborative data warehouse . You’ll get clear explanations of the goals and objectives of each stage of the data warehouse lifecycle while learning the roles that both business managers and technicians play at each stage. Discussions of the most critical decision points for success at each phase of the data warehouse lifecycle help you understand ways in which both business and IT management can make decisions that best meet unified objectives. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Laura Reeves | | Paperback:
| 480 pages | | Publisher:
| Wiley | | Publication Date:
| May 26, 2009 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0470176385 | | Product Length:
| 7.42 inches | | Product Width:
| 1.12 inches | | Product Height:
| 9.3 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.55 pounds | | Package Length:
| 9.0 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.4 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.2 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.5 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 12 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 Good Overview Of Data Warehousing For Managers And BeyondJan 23, 2010
By Philip R. Heath
"Gadgets, Music, & Books"
A Manager's Guide to Data Warehousing by Laura L. Reeves is an excellent primer for managers as well as business team members on what it means to create a data warehouse. Reeves' book is broken into five parts that build up the necessary knowledge for readers.
Part One is two chapters and it gives a broad overview of data warehouses and helps in setting expectations for what it will take to start from the ground up. This is an excellent place for executives and senior leadership across the company to get base level knowledge. People at lower levels of the organization may find this section a bit lacking in detail. However it is still worth reading in order to be on the same page with leadership or to gain insight on how to communicate the information at an appropriate level to executives. The approach Reeves uses is a pattern that could be used for other subjects as well.
Part Two takes four chapters and deals with the business perspective of data warehouses. Technical team members may be tempted to skip this section, but I would highly discourage this. The ideas that Reeves presents on establishing partnerships between business and IT could be applied to any IT project where collaboration with the business is required. The content on roles and responsibilities as well as requirements gathering are good for setting the business up for the part that they will play in a data warehouse project. IT team members will likely consider these given, but it is instructive to try to understand how your organization lines up against what Reeves proposes. While not a prescriptive checklist, it is good to think through how your organization handles these.
Parts Three through Five are where the details come in to play. In contrast to the first two parts, it will be more tempting for the business team to checkout and skip the remainder of the material. I would also discourage this as well. Reeves does a great job of keeping the information at a high enough level as not to bog down in minutia. Front line business team members will also benefit from having a solid basis for communicating with the IT team throughout the day to day project execution. It is important to note that this is not a detailed "how to" for IT to implement a data warehouse. This topic would not lend itself well to the context of Reeves' book, and Reeves rightly suggests that readers interested in this should look to other resources.
Although the title of the book suggests that it is just for the "pointy haired bosses" (which I happen to be), it is useful to a wider audience. The only real criticism that I have is that it does seem to move slowly at times. That is often the trade off that authors make when tackling a fairly broad topic in a way that is meaningful to a diverse audience. If you are an IT manager or above or a member of the business team new to data warehousing, Reeves book is a good place to start.
Overall: B
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Author knows her data warehousing chopsJan 04, 2010
By Techie Evan
The main take-aways from this book are the very useful tips on how to help your business and technical teams collaborate well so that they could keep moving forward with the project with as little delays as possible.
As manager, you need to know some data warehousing terms and concepts, but more importantly, you need to have a good understanding of each project participant's roles and responsibilities, and how you can help them get their jobs done.
Written by a very experienced consultant, this book will equip you with the requisite knowledge for a number of areas to help you make informed decisions.
The only criticism that I have is that the book contains materials that I consider tangential; not a whole lot but still if they had been cut out of the book I would not have missed them, nor felt cheated. For example, I would assume that one of the skills a manager would already have is how to give a presentation. And yet, at one point in the book, the author apparently thought it important enough to digress from the discussion to give presentation tips such as font size selection, etc.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Essential study material for all data management managersDec 19, 2009
By Charles Ashbacher
It is now an essential requirement that all businesses store their data, keep it secure and mine all possible relevant information from it. Government regulations, liability concerns and the fact that competitors are using their data to gain advantage make it truly a do-or-die scenario. For even moderately sized operations, the amount of data that can and must be collected is very large, to the point where a data warehouse should be constructed.
A data warehouse is a set of processes and procedures for the storage, duplication, managing, and processing of the data so that integrity and security is maintained and it is available to authorized people and in the proper form when needed. Managers generally do not possess the fine technical skills needed to do the hands-on work, but they do need a level of knowledge that allows them to understand the options and make the correct decisions. That is the point of this book and it is well made.
Once the decision is made to construct a data warehouse, there is generally a four-step continuous process with feedback.
1) Plan the design of the warehouse and construct the set of data use policies.
2) Model the design and test the model to the extent possible and practical, feedback to step 1 when appropriate.
3) Construct, test and document the data warehouse and feedback to steps 2 and 1 when appropriate.
4) Implement and maintain the warehouse, modifying the other steps when appropriate.
Within this apparently simple process, a great deal of options are embedded and that is where the manager earns their pay. While their role is generally not to carry out specific construction tasks, the responsibility of the manager is to:
1) Learn enough technical detail to understand the process.
2) Learn enough about the impact of not doing the project so that a realistic appraisal of not creating a data warehouse can be presented.
3) Act as devil's advocate to ask probing questions and make sure all opinions are given a fair hearing.
4) Act as the project champion to superiors in order to get upper level approval and financial support.
5) Keep the development process on track so that it is completed in a timely and cost-effective manner.
6) Make sure that the rules in the set of data-use policies are all reasonable and defensible, both internally and in the legal world.
As this list indicates, the work life of a data warehouse manager is a complex, difficult and rewarding one. Fortunately, there are resources such as this book that will allow you to identify and defuse many of the standard land mines that can be encountered. Even though I am technically very competent in the computing field, if I was to be handed the job of a data manager, I would ask for a delay of a day or two before accepting. That would give me time to read this book and understand what I would be agreeing to.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Dry as dust, but has useful informationDec 12, 2009
By Jerry Saperstein
Data (information) is the base of all organizations, from small to large. Organizing data is a challenge and always has been. What has changed is that the technology now allows not only for the accumulation of more data, but makes keeping it easier and less expensive. Government regulations, insurance requirements and other factors make it mandatory to retain some information for varying periods while some information is best disposed of as quickly as possible to avoid or mitigate legal liability. People working on the tech side of the organization usually know little of the present or potential value of the data they are responsible for managing, while manager typically know little of how the technology might make delivery of vital information more efficient and put the information into easily usable form.
Enter the "data warehouse". Not long ago, it was a buzzword, but as the hype died down, some people truly got the idea of what a data warehouse is and how it can be used. Author Laura Reeves appears to be one of them. In one of the clearest sentences in her book, she says "the purpose and characteristics of a data warehousing environment are to provide data in a format easily understood by the business community in order to support decision-making processes. The data warehouse supports looking at the business data over time to identify significant trends in buying behavior, customer retention, or changes in employee productivity."
The dry as dust tone of the above carries through the entire book. It is eye-wearying stuff, but much of the information Reeves conveys will be useful for the non-technical business manager trying to get a grasp of the data warehouse concept. A lot of it is also hooey, such as the fake case histories with lines like this classic: "The project tea members all work hard to keep the project moving forward in a timely manner, and often this happens without the direct intervention from the sponsor." This corporate silly talk takes up way too much space: this book could easily have been two-thirds the size without surrendering any vital information.
Overall, Reeves stays in descriptive mode, describing how a model project might flow, how appropriate information might be collected and so on. There is very little specificity within these more than 400 pages. On the other hand, business managers typically don't prosper in the detail rich environment a technical person demands.
My impression is that this is information presented in a manner executives seek out at seminars presented at 5-star resorts billed as training sessions.
This is a good book, in general, for people who need to comprehend from a level of zero practical knowledge what data warehousing is about. The more intelligent reader may find Reeves' presentation irritating. It is bone-dry and presumes the reader has little intelligence. But the book does provide useful information on the subject and that is what counts in the final analysis.
Jerry
 A Manager's Guide to Data WarehousingDec 14, 2011
By midnight821
A Manager's Guide to Data Warehousing is introduced as a non-technical professional's guide to data warehousing. Now, we can usually expect a "technical" guide to be rather boring and bland, but this non-technical version takes it to a new level. I suppose that data warehousing is not an exciting topic, except to those of who that work in related fields. With that said, Reeves does a decent job in explaining the benefits and potential pitfalls that you will experience with your organization's data warehousing.
The guide does a good job of explaining that any data warehousing project really needs to take business requirements into account and that their needs to be a solid understanding for everyone involved, both technical and non-technical personnel. Developing a plan and setting policies is an important part of data warehousing and vital to its success. To some extent, I felt the book hit on many topics that any manager would already have before diving into a project like this. While there were many good tips on data warehousing, I felt the author could have gone into more detail and skip some general project management type tips. Overall, a good read for anyone getting ready to take on this endeavor.
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