I’m talking about the occasional religious wars we wage in IT. Here are some examples: What type of requirements modeling is better – data flow diagrams or entity relationship diagrams (circa 1976)? What type of DBMS is better – hierarchical or relational (circa 1982)? What type of data warehouse design is better – relational or multidimensional (circa 1996)? What type of methodology is better – waterfall or agile (circa 2001)? What type of agile methodology is better for DW/BI – software-centric Scrum/XP or data-centric Extreme Scoping[TM]? The latter appears to have been triggered by my last article Beware of Scrum Fanatics on DW/BI Projects.”

At some point during the initial phase of the data governance initiative, the team charged with designing the program will need to solicit and receive executive support. For many people this is a challenging prospect, and one that can leave managers and individual contributors wondering “What do we do?”

Databases are the root of the success for the applications that they support. Creating an effective database for any need requires understanding the business needs you are trying to fulfill, the data that is encompassed in it, and the people who are going to use it. Getting the business resources together to gather the information needed to build the data model is the first step.