Data Quality and the Data Warehouse: A Decision Support System for Allocation of Scarce Resources

This paper describes a decision support system (DSS) for use in allocating scarce resources associated with data quality efforts in the construction of a data warehouse. The DSS is populated with metadata from a data warehouse project, including tags that identify the quality at intersections of data field, data use, and data dimension. The resulting DSS can then be queried by novices on a data warehouse project based on criteria and priorities set by management. The results of an experiment using business students are then presented. It can be shown that, given the proper set of skills, business students, as proxies for novices on a data warehouse development team, can effectively use the tool to analyze and prioritize hundreds of potential fields in a data warehouse project.