The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server™ 2005 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset

16.2. Marketing and Expectation Management

At the same time you are project-focused on building the second and subsequent iterations, you need to be outwardly focused on the connections between the data warehouse and the rest of the organization. Marketing is probably the wrong term to use for this section because Marketing has a bad reputation with most technical folks—although not as bad as its evil twin, Sales. (Just kidding, some of our best friends are in Sales.) It may be more appealing to view the activities in this section as educational efforts. But call it what you will—in this "what have you done for me lately" world, you must actively and constantly market the BI system.

From an educational perspective, your goal is to make sure everyone knows what they need to know about the BI system. Management needs to know how their investment is going. Specifically, they need to know how it is being used to generate value for the organization. It also helps them to see how it is being used in different parts of the company. Analysts and other knowledge workers need to know how they can use the DW/BI system more effectively and why it's important to them. The IT organization also needs to know what's going on with the DW/BI system. You need close working relationships with the source system managers on the input side of the data warehouse, and with other information-driven systems on the output side of the data warehouse. Fortunately, you have some quantitative and qualitative ...