(Length: 15 pages)

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Data warehousing initiatives increasingly span multiple business domains to meet organizations' strategic goals, but project teams encounter difficulties in providing accurate and complete functional specifications. Extending requirements across domains inevitably increases the challenge by provoking cross-domain disagreements — making it critical to involve individuals with the authority to resolve those disagreements. Forrester recommends a business data governance model with three roles — the sponsor, the diplomat, and the guru — to maintain the proper balance of authority and expertise so that organizations can specify requirements with minimal iteration that align with their goals.