USM undertakes datawarehouse readiness assessment services through a four-week process. During this four-week assessment, USM will assess your current state of readiness to launch a data warehouse initiative. Research has shown most data warehouses go over budget or fail either due to lack of planning or not performing a due diligence in the early stages of the design process. At the end of this assessment USM will be in a position to provide the following:

• Assessment and documentation of current hardware and software infrastructure
  
  
• Identification of Scope: Documentation of operational support systems (Sources) that will feed the data warehouse
  
  
• Complete Functional Requirements Document (FRD) that contains documented business drivers and requirements from users at all levels across the enterprise and organized according to functional business unit
  
  
• Capacity planning for hardware and software requirements that are tailored to the amount of data your organization will be extracting and loading daily
  
  
• 3-Year budget and costs planning required in order to develop, support and maintain the data warehouse.
  
  
• Recommend Data Warehouse Architecture (Operational Data Store, Data Mart, or Enterprise Data Warehouse) and implementation project plan for developing the solution
  
  
• Recommend hardware and software configurations tailored to your existing infrastructure, volume of data and user requirements
  
  
• Recommendations for creating and setting the enterprise reporting strategy
  
  
• Early Identification of Business Intelligence tools that will satisfy the user and budget (Selecting the right tools is a combination of requirements, budget and existing infrastructure)
  
  
• Early identification of Fact, Dimensions and Conformed Dimensions for your Data Warehouse
  
  
• Assistance in helping calculate return on investment (ROI)

This assessment is designed to capture the complete set of user requirements and completes the requirements analysis (infrastructure, user, financial, hardware, and tools) in order to begin developing your Data Warehouse Solution.