As a project team, you must always focus on the users' gain. If the team's activities don't provide benefit to the business users, the data warehouse will continue to drift. Revisit your plans to determine and then focus on delivering to the users' most critical needs. The Matrix is one of the data warehouse team's most powerful tools. Use it to clarify your thinking, communicate critical points of conformance, establish the overall data roadmap, and assess your current progress against the long-term plan.
Conformed dimensions are absolutely critical to the long-term viability of a data warehouse.
We find many warehouse teams are reluctant to take on the socio-political challenges of defining conformed dimensions. In all honesty, it's extremely difficult for a data warehouse team to establish and develop conformed dimensions on its own. Yet the team can't ignore the issue and hope it will resolve itself. You'll need management support for conformed dimensions to help navigate the organizational difficulties inherent in the effort. Data shortcomings are often at the root of data warehouse course adjustments - it's either the wrong data, inappropriately structured or prematurely summarized.