State of Louisiana – Dept. of Revenue - Enterprise Data Modeling Project

Project Description

The Louisiana Department of Revenue (LDR) maintains information system applications to support tax administration (and ancillary) applications. Application data for these systems currently reside in relational databases (DB2/MVS, SQLServer, and Access) and non-relational data sources (sequential files, VSAM files, Excel). Currently information access for these systems is supported by extensive development of custom reports and limited ad hoc access to the operational database of each application.

The goal of the project was to provide a highly accessible, intuitive, single point of access to the information contained within LDR’s various applications. The approach for meeting this goal included the development of a series of business area data marts and the development of an enterprise data warehouse. In order to achieve these goals, LDR contracted with Estrada Consulting, Inc. (ECI) to accomplish specific business objectives for Part-1 of Phase I of this project. Part-1 objectives included:

1. Determined business needs across the agency which can be addressed via data access.
2. Planned for a single point of access to information contained in diverse business applications.
3. Planned for the publishing and broadcasting of commonly requested information to eliminate redundant data access and retrieval.
4. Designed a logical data model for the enterprise data warehouse.
5. Designed a business function data mart identified as the best starting point for the enterprise data warehouse.

ECI was responsible for the identification, assignment, and oversight of all tasks necessary for the successful completion of Part-1 of the Phase I data mart. ECI’s primary responsibilities for this project were:

• Project Management and Administration – Provide project management services to include such functions as initiation and monitoring of a comprehensive development methodology, development and maintenance of the project work plan, ongoing project control, scheduling and work assignments, review of all project deliverables, identification and management of project risks, implementation planning, and project status reporting.
• Requirements Gathering and Design – Provide design services to include functions such as business requirements gathering and definition, data modeling, logical database design, physical database design, data retention strategy, and hardware sizing and configuration. As part of the design component, ECI developed a comprehensive implementation strategy that is consistent with the State’s current requirements and anticipated requirements for future development. Requirements definition was a critical component for the development of an implementation plan. Requirements Gathering and Design responsibilities included:
• Conducted the collection and analysis of user requirements (with State assistance)
• Assisted LDR staff with selecting the first data mart for implementation
• Defined the functional requirements of the data mart
• Defined the security requirements of the data mart
• Created of the data mart’s logical data model
• Created of the Enterprise Data Warehouse logical data model
• Estimated the initial reports to be generated from the Phase I data mart
• Estimated physical database design needs
• Knowledge Transfer – Prepared LDR State staff to assume responsibility for continued support and enhancement of the system throughout the lifecycle. The primary goal of knowledge transfer is to assist the State in meeting its business goals and objectives by creating proficient users of the system. ECI delivered a training plan for both technical and functional project staff with goals of education and training curriculum for the state project team were:
• Accelerated the team’s ability to effectively communicate using relevant data warehousing and business intelligence terms and concepts.
• Ensured rapid, top-quality capability transfer to move the project team quickly along the learning curve to self-sufficiency.
• Provided a level of knowledge to the project team to enable State staff to assume the responsibility of developing and delivering end-user training.

ECI produced the following deliverables on for the project:

• Deliverable 1 - Project Work Plan • Deliverable 2 - Plan for requirements gathering, including a detailed list of tasks
• Deliverable 3 - Logical and conceptual design documents for enterprise data warehouse
• Deliverable 4 - Logical and conceptual design documents for Phase I data mart
• Deliverable 5 - Methodology for incorporating the Enterprise Data Warehouse into LDR’s disaster recovery plans
• Deliverable 6 - Security classification of all data to be contained in the warehouse
• Deliverable 7 - System documentation
• Deliverable 8 - Completed quality assurance review