Strategic planning for data warehousing in the public sector

The City of St. Louis, Missouri, is a large municipality with an extremely fragmented organizational structure. The City recently undertook a major strategic planning study for development of its municipal information systems. In the course of the study, data warehousing emerged as a strategy for consolidating and sharing information among many City departments with different informational needs and a variety of computing platforms. We describe processes and analytical methods that proved useful for shaping a data warehousing strategy and for determining the contents of the data warehouse. We also present some cautionary conclusions about the development of monolithic data warehouses for decision support.