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In the movie Field of Dreams, a voice told Kevin Costner, "If you build it, they will come." But simply building a data warehouse won't guarantee that people will use it. What you build and how you build it has a major impact on whether or not the potential consumers of your service will use it.
To plan a data warehouse, an organization can either start with its existing data sources, or determine user needs and work back to available data sources. Sources are most often the production data processing systems that record data about customers, products, orders, etc. These are the fundamental records of the business and, in most firms, will comprise the bulk of data in the warehouse.
My preference is to start with the users. Every business has individuals who don't know what's available, who need data that's not easily accessible, and who can't find data because it's scattered through multiple systems. This is the "market" for your data warehouse, and...