Read the following case and answer all questions

1. Whats the scope of the project?
2. what can be considered a data warehousing failure in this case?
3. Why did this data warehouse/business intelligence project fail?

At a technology-driven firm in the Western United States, the marketing and finance departments needed information such as trend analyses to make operational and strategic decisions. Because this information was vital, a separate department was generating reports solely to support this need. However, IT management suggested a warehouse solution which would provide the same information but at a lower cost. The company decided to buy a packaged warehouse for a little over a million dollars. While this purchased solution was marketed as a data warehouse, it really only contained transactional data. The end result was not a data warehouse but an operational data store, and this data store did not provide useful, high quality data. So, after a year and a half, the project was scrapped. However, IT believed the software purchased, not the idea of a warehouse, was the problem.Therefore, IT proposed a second warehouse to upper management and this one was to be built with the appropriate architecture. The approach was to build compatible, independent data marts. As satisfaction within the company for the data marts increased, IT planned to integrate the different data marts into an integrated warehouse. A formal proposal was written which specified data sources, business questions, cost for a consultant, and the length of the project (four phases around three months in each phase). What was interesting about this proposal was that IT did not want to highlight the costs of the project because the previous purchased warehouse had cost so much and ended up failing. Therefore, no money was formally budgeted for extraction, cleansing, transformation, and loading tools. The rationale was that once the first phase of the project was up and running, management would feel more comfortable with the endeavor and want to commit additional resources to it. Until then, the only other resources budgeted for were a consultant and a small amount of IT staff time. The IT employees were supposed to work on the project only in their spare time. Over the course of a year, the employees spent about six weeks worth of full-time work. Moreover, the vice presidents of the business areas for which the warehouses were being built were not heavily involved, so it was difficult to pull resources from those departments to assist with the project. At the time that the first extraction for the warehouse was to take place, a change in the position of vice president of IT occurred. The new vice president had a warehouse project that was previously established with its own project team, architecture, and tools. So, the second project was dropped and the newer project replaced it. However, due to delays, unsuitable data sources, and another turnover in the position of vice president of IT, the third warehouse never came to fruition.In this company, three different warehouse projects failed. The first was due to inappropriate software; the second to lack of formal commitment from management and organizational turnover; and the third to inappropriate data sources and, again, organizational turnover.Despite these setbacks, this company is reviving the initial in-house warehouse project. The newest vice president has hired a director to oversee decision support and warehousing, so resources from IT have been formally committed. However, while the project is currently in progress, management commitment from other departments is still not very strong. They are afraid this project will also be a failure. In hindsight, one of the project team members said that the in-house data warehousing project should have been proposed when the company was performing its budgeting. This might have increased management commitment by formally budgeting resources (staffing and expenditures) for the project.