Conducted by the Data Warehouse Architect, this service spells out the architectural components best suited to delivering on the needs identified in the Opportunity Assessment, Business Analysis and Data Assessment services.

Architectural components include the Technology Architecture, Data Architecture, Security Architecture and Data Warehouse Architecture.

The Technology Architecture specifies the technologies to be used, and will be influenced by the company's existing technology standards, such as intranet/web, client/server, middleware and ETL software, RDBMS software, security software, and hardware

The Data Architecture specifies which data sources will be used, how they will be accessed by middleware or ETL (Extract Transform Load) software, how they will be loaded to the data warehouse.

The Security Architecture specifies how the security requirements will be met, whether through LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) or other method, and how tightly the security will be integrated with the company's existing security methods.

The Data Warehouse Architecture specifies the structure of the data warehouse and/or data marts, including the handling of metadata. Typically the architecture consists of staging tables for data loading and preparation (Entity-Relationship schema), and production tables (star schema) to house the read-only data which will be made available for analysis. Often this production data will be further distributed to conformed data marts for high-performance access by local applications.