I just talked to the wife of a work colleague to give her advice on the job description/responsibilities for a data warehouse architect for their small growing software company that has acquired 5 companies in last year. Are there any "So you want to build a data warehouse?" resources already out there - realistic C-level stuff? I talked for about an hour about all the things that would go into it from the modeling to ETL to reporting and I felt like I could still cover another couple hours.
That was one of my points to her is that most people are doing this data lake thing where they just throw it all in and hope the queries can handle it.
To me, it seems like instead of committing to a long term (but hopefully agile and flexible) process and principles, they are playing by ear and just hoping it works out.
@bbaird "software" is all I know, it sounds like a couple of the companies are on Salesforce, others on different things and sounds like it's mostly financial reporting and sales pipeline. She is supposed to send me the LinkedIn posting to review as well as share to people who might be interested. She said it's a young company that's small but growing.
I gathered from the discussion that it's more of a FTE position than a contractor/project, and that's what I would hope, because I think it's something that requires long term commitment to integrating into the company's operations. But it was mostly me explaining the overall areas normally involved and piecing in the little bits she was giving me.
The issues she has (from the CFO's office, I gathered) are getting the various things all combined into her PowerBI so she can report. It sounds like they may have made a little headway on a couple Salesforce data sources, but that the BI person who combined those two doesn't have experience building a data warehouse from scratch.
It did sounds like a couple of the common pain points of a DW project might not be so bad - getting buy in - the company is small and the growth pains have everyone motivated and it's driven by the CFO (low politics, silos based on companies, not power structures), and knowing the expected reporting needs/users (not building a DW with no actual use cases). However, the issues of disparate sources, transport issues from the divisions, etc would still remain.