Blog: Krish Krishnan

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Successful Chargeback Models

I have been looking at this model of building a data warehouse by organizations where a corporate data warehouse is built and all its users are grouped by divisions or departments and charged for using the data warehouse. This is certainly a good model for the data warehouse team, especially if a corporate It team is owning the data warehouse. But there are a few issues that arise from this model

1. A business case - For every change in this environment a business case is needed. Without a strong business case, no changes are feasible in the data warehouse. Simple changes maybe an easy in, but anything new or complex will need investigations and sponsorship.

2. IT driven and business used - The data warehouse largely becomes IT driven. This may not be a good idea, since the business usage will be not embraced by all users. The business may also try to use workarounds to get the data and the information they need

How do you enable a successful chargeback model

1. Organizational Alignment - A key driver, that I have always emphasized on, this is a critical component.

2. Business stakeholders - Involve a business stakeholder in every steering committee and make the business own facets of the problem. This will ensure that even if IT drives the solution, business owns the problem.

3. Roles and Deliverables - A set of clearly defined roles and deliverables will be needed to clarify who owns what components.

4. Defined SLAs - Another key component is the definition of service level agreements on data, availability etc that need to be defined.

For a successful chargeback model to be implemented, a few ideas are outlined here, more analysis and customization of the concepts will be needed to make this a possibility in the real world.

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