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photo, Bill Inmon
Two phenomena are occurring simultaneously today - the advent of corporations building data warehouses and the movement of development of IT projects offshore. It is therefore a natural question to ask: Are we going to be developing data warehouses offshore? However, there are many good reasons why offshore development of data warehouses is not in the cards.
Why is it that data warehouses do not lend themselves to offshore development? Why are data warehouses different from other types of IT projects and structures? From a tactical perspective, data warehouses deal with and operate on data, not processes. It is processes that are economically built offshore. Data is a different story altogether. Whereas you can specify processes down to a fine degree, specifying, defining and developing data for a data warehouse is a different beast altogether.
Another factor making data warehouses poor candidates for offshore development is that there is no such thing as a generic data warehouse. Each data warehouse is different for each company - even companies in the same line of business. You cannot make cookie- cutter data warehouses.
Another critical tactical reason why you should not develop data warehouses offshore is that the very nature of data warehouses is an environment in which requirements are never firm. Data warehouses are built for end users. Additionally, end users operate in a mode of not knowing what they want. End users operate in a mode of, "Give me what I say I want, then I can tell you what I really want." They also operate in a mode of...