Case Studies in Knowledge Management

Implementing Knowledge-Enabled CRM Strategy in a Large Company 265

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EDW Design and Customization Stage

The EDW project is a very multifunctional and multitasking endeavor that tran-
scends functional boundaries, for example, technology, product, marketing, market
research, and finance. In 2000, GTCOM formed different committees to oversee the first
phase of the project. These were the Business Intelligence Steering Committee (BISC)
representing GMs (high-level senior managers) and Project Management Committee
(PMC) consisting of the IT project manager and key business representatives from
marketing, sales, back office, and customer care. There were also subcommittees looking
into technical details of the system such as format of reports, quality of data, and others.
Soon, GTCOM finalized the design and started customizing the EDW and transfer-
ring information from the source systems into the EDW system. The end of 2002
witnessed the completion of the first stage called Increased Business Value. During 2003,
the second phase (Expansion and Growth) began.
The high-level design of the EDW was composed of the following:

• The data warehouse itself, which contains the data and associated software;


• Data acquisition software (back-end), which extracts data from legacy systems and
  external sources, consolidates and summarizes the data, and loads it into the data
  warehouse (operational side);


• The client (front-end) software, which allows users of business intelligence, tools
  such as decision support systems (DSS), executive information systems (EIS), data
  mining, and customer relationship management (CRM) to access and analyze data
  in the warehouse (analytical side).

The design and customization process involved the following decisions/activities:

• Customizing the standard;


• LDM of the vendor to meet GTCOM’s BRs and rules;


• Designing a high-level data sourcing and architecture design to support the
  established BRs;


• Designing data access architecture and user access points;


• Designing management and maintenance structure, which includes system, man-
  agement, user administration, security management, as well as backup, archive, and
  recovery (BAR).

EDW Testing and Support Stage

The testing process consisted of activities such as defining the test environment,
defining test cases and test data, assembling the components to be tested, executing the
test, analyzing results, correcting identified problems, and revising/updating the testing
process throughout the life of the project.
The support function involves a number of processes and tools that will be used
to give the users the access priority adequate for them according to the service level
agreement (SLA). This is done via a number of processes and tools.

EDW Implementation and Operation Stage

This harmonizes well with the concept of EDW, which is an interdisciplinary
endeavor that needs to transcend functional boundaries, that is, technology, product,