What is the Business Intelligence Project Lifecycle
Question: Define what is the business intelligence project lifecycle. Explain all the phases in detail with examples.
Answer: The Data Warehouse Project Life Cycle model consists of the following phases:
- Envision
- Plan
- Build
- Stabilize
- Deploy
- The initial phase is the Envisioning phase where the Vision and the final scope needs to be agreed and approved.
- The second phase is the Plan phase where interviews with the business sponcers and the stake holders (Direct & Indirect) are conducted to gather business requirements. Project planning is done based on requirements and a BI functional document is created.
- The Build phase is the longest phase where based on the agreed scope, Design and implementation of the BI architecture is done. The developers will design and develop the data models and integrate with data marts and LOB (Line of Business Applications) such as CRM, Retail, ERP, IT and the Web. Using tools like SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) Extract, Transform & Load (ETL) is done to populate the de-normalized databases in the data warehouse.
- In the Stabilize phase, product stability is tested before moving to production.
- The final phase is the Deployment phase, where the complete development process is completed and the system is moved into production for end users.