Monitoring strategic goals in data warehouses with awareness requirements

A data warehouse (DW) system stores data from multiple data sources in integrated form and provides capabilities for monitoring business operations to ensure compliance to strategic goals. As such, DWs constitute a fundamental building block for Business Intelligence (BI) operations. In this paper, we introduce the notion of Awareness Requirements (AwReqs) in the requirements analysis and elicitation phase for DWs. In this context, AwReqs provide analysts with the means for eliciting and modeling requirements over performance measures (indicators) to appraise the success or failure of strategic goals. To demonstrate the benefit of our approach, we present a typical business example throughout the paper and show how we can establish in the early stages of DW design the adequacy of the design for BI operations.