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

15.1. Providing User Support

The design and development of your DW/BI system has focused on building a system that's easy to use, intuitive, and performs well. You've built BI applications, be they canned reports, a dashboard portal, a closed loop data mining application, or a combination of all. You've trained the users on the data and applications. What's left to do?

A lot. The business user community will grow and change. Some users will learn the new tools immediately. Others will require some hand-holding and retraining. Even if your system is perfect and the business users catch on immediately, you'll need to bring new employees up-to-speed. On an ongoing basis, it's not unusual to have the same number of people involved with supporting the business users as initially developed the system.

The user-facing part of the DW/BI team engages in the following activities:

• BI portal maintenance and enhancement

• BI application specification and development

• BI Help Desk support and training, discussed in Chapter 14

We've seen the user-facing side of the DW/BI team range in size from dozens of people for large companies with a centralized DW/BI system, to a single person. The smallest organizations often have a single-person shop, but it's really hard for that person to handle the back-room maintenance while communicating effectively with the business users. Ongoing, it's hard to see how you can get by with fewer than two people: one for the back room, and one for the front room.

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