Validating metrics for data warehouses

Organisations are adopting data warehouses to manage information efficiently as the main organisational asset. This success of data warehouses (DW) can be explained because a data warehouse is a set of data and technologies aimed at enabling the executives, managers and analysts to make better and faster decisions. Due to the principal role of data warehouses in taking strategic decisions, quality is fundamental. One of the most important factors that affects the quality of the final system is its design. Although in recent years different authors have proposed some useful guidelines to design a data warehouse, more objective indicators are needed to help designers and managers to develop quality data warehouses. A set of metrics for data warehouse models is presented, and an empirical validation is carried out in order to prove practically their usefulness as quality indicators.