Towards a Framework Incorporating Functional and Non Functional Requirements for Datawarehouse Conceptual Design

Data warehouse (DW) architectures, which are at the core of many new generation information systems, are designed to provide decision makers and professional analysts with intuitive and performing means to explore and get intelligent data from large heterogeneous databases. Most methods dealing with DW projects focus on functional requirements related to data quality; nonfunctional requirements like security, performance or operability are considered in a complete separate way. The lack of a global approach that gather concurrently both aspects from the requirements analysis to the conceptual design causes that many DW projects fail to meet their goals in satisfying users’ needs and expectations. This work aims at developing a framework that encompasses both functional and non-functional requirements during the whole process of data warehouse design. This is achieved by integrating three additional aspects in the requirements analysis workflow, namely organizational, decisional and business process views. We select the telecom industry for our case study to demonstrate the viability of our approach.