Information is required by business users throught the industry. However, as part of our consulting engagements, we also encounter a lack of proper description what the business user actually needs. So we want to use this article to present the way we structure our information requirements internally at Scalefree and with many customers.
What about User Stories?
We all know user stories from Scrum. And we all know them from many business intelligence projects. Their structure is typically something like:
As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>.
The following example represents a typical user story we would receive in a project:
As a <marketing user>, I want <to have an overview report with the number of leads from a marketing channel> so that <I can adjust the marketing budget accordingly>.
Now, what should we do with this user story? Many details are missing, and yes, we all know about product backlog refinement. The problem is that user story is just not sufficient in business intelligence and some structure might be of help.
Information Requirements
Developers in enterprise data warehousing and business intelligence need much more details than just the user story. On the other hand, the user story is a good starting point for the information requirement. So it is the typical introduction. The overall structure looks like this: Read More