Great post over on Hexware’s blog with recommendations on what you should be documenting as part of your BI / Data Warehouse project.
I know of a couple of SAS Data Warehouse sites that are using a Wiki as a collaborative environment for documentation and we are using Mediawiki on a SAS BI/DW project I am working on at the moment.
We are using the Wiki to document all our processes, development standards, business rules and content (when we get time of course).
One of the things I struggle with is how to integrate the technical metadata, that resides in the SAS Metadata Repository, with the business metadata we are storing in the Wiki.
To that end at sasInct we are developing a web service that will interogate the SAS Metadata Repository and then display the results via a Mediawiki plugin. The goal is to enable the technical metadata to be streamed to the Wiki in realtime and remove the need to copy and paste etc, or maintain two version.
We are also starting to make use of the description fields in Information Maps to provide business metadata to users when running a report, but we haven’t come up with an approach yet of how to populate that from the Wiki, or how to enable a user to click on an object in a report and open the relevant Wiki page with the business metadata.
Feel free to comment if you have done something cool in this space.
I saw you speak about this at the SUNZ forum earlier this year, and I remember being struck by what a good idea it was. I’d really like to implement something similar where I am, as I can see a lot of value in having this information available in realtime, but more importantly, in allowing us to pool business information currently stored in people’s heads. I like the fact that, as you point out, this is something that can be done when people get time, so it doesn’t have to spring fully-formed into existence.