Transitioning a Clinical Unit to Data Warehousing
- When?
- Friday 27 May 2011, 10:30 to 11:30
- Where?
- 39BB02
- Open to:
- Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Mrs Arwa Jamjoom
This research proposes a method for developing a data warehouse in a clinical environment while particularly focusing on the requirements specification phase. It is conducted primarily to target organizations whose requirements are not clearly defined and are not yet aware of the benefits of implementing a data warehouse. By integrating key ideas such as the agile manifesto, maintaining data quality, and incremental and prototyping approaches, it provides a platform for collaboration and participation between users and designers, as well as identifying relevant processes and their additional value. It is also important to note that this work was performed in the context of a Clinical Unit with limited experience of IT, and limited budget. An important research objective was to demonstrate how to obtain significant “buy-in” to a data warehouse solution at low-cost, and minimal risk to the clinical unit.
Background: Data warehouse (DW) projects are inherently risky with significant causes and sources of failure, in addition to the inherent difficulties of any technology project. Data warehousing faces a number of challenges in terms of cultural perspectives, proper selection of the development approach, and standardization. As the business requirement analysis phase is one of the most important factors in data warehousing success, there is a need for specifying and gathering the right information in a more comprehensive, effective, and formal manner, anticipating future requirements with less effort, and exploring the ways to stimulate end users to be more creative in the expression of their needs.
The research was based on an intensive literature review that covered: (1) a review and analysis of the leading data warehouse development methodologies and most common approaches, (2) a survey of ten real life examples of developing data warehouse in healthcare industries, and (3) a study of related work in data warehouse development methodologies. In addition, 26 professionals from the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Jeddah (KFSH&RC-J) were interviewed for over 55 hours, summarized in a document containing 58 interviews. The researcher also attended three training workshops (lasting a total of 8 hours) to become more familiar with the systems and its end users. The current research on data warehouse development methodologies is presented in three cases: developing a standard platform, improving a single method approach or integrating more than one approach with another. Different kinds of techniques have also been adopted to improve on the business requirements phase. However, difficulties are still experienced in data warehouse development. Thus, a proposed methodology supported by Agile development processes was presented. It was closely developed with cooperation from a leading hospital in Saudi Arabia; the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Jeddah (KFSH&RC-J).
The proposed methodology has been able to deliver a fully functional DW within a good time scale and with minimal resources. It was able to meet business requirements for the system and maintain a positive engagement with the end users. It resulted in no significant re-work to do during iterations and stimulated the generation of requirements from end users. While additional features could usefully be added in later releases, the reception of the system was favourable and was deemed very useful and beneficial.
We note that our experience is situated in a very specific context. As a result one needs to be cautious about the generalisability of the experience. For this reason, we have reported our work as a detailed narrative and emphasise the importance of taking a holistic view of the experience reported in this thesis.
The Department wishes Mrs Arwa Jamjoom success in this presentation for her PhD Viva.
