The role of boundary objects and boundary spanning in data warehousing - A research-in-progress report

Data warehouse projects bring together different communities of practice, with the primary objective of producing one body of information which is capable of comparative advantages in business analysis. Due to the number of involved communities and the complexity of their collaboration, data warehouse projects are costly. In this paper we give a closer look at communication problems on boundaries between participating data warehouse projects’ communities. Our analysis enlightens the potential relation between the early creation of language communities of the involved communities and lowering data warehouse project development costs. As today, there is hardly any methodology available for analyzing and aligning mutual understanding between data warehouse project participants. In this paper, we propose a data warehouse development scheme for project improvement based on our discussion as a first step in a design science project.