Be sensitive to business areas with the most urgent need for a tactical solution. With pressure from business users to obtain critical business data, enterprises must determine which areas have the most urgent need for a data mart. This process can be expedited by analyzing the data to be used and selecting business areas with overlapping data requirements, consequently reducing the amount of data investigation and deployment time required. To minimize the resources dedicated to numerous data mart projects, management must prioritize the projects. Limit the number of data sources to three.
Data acquisition is the most complex aspect of any data mart or data warehouse implementation.
For some enterprises, only one or two relational databases serve as the data source. However, because the average IS department supports five to eight data management technologies and 30 to 50 data stores, the data acquisition and integration complexities quickly can become too much for most data mart products to handle efficiently. If a data mart implementation deemed to be critical requires data from more than three sources, the added time and resources needed to build the data acquisition process may be better applied to a different data mart opportunity. The alternative to building a new data mart is to restrict the number of sources and deploy a data mart of limited usability. Define a policy to prevent data mart proliferation.