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

1.1. The Most Important Determinant of Long-Term Success

There is one common factor in successful business intelligence projects: delivering business value. Your DW/BI team must embrace the goal of enhancing business value as its primary purpose. This seems like an obvious statement, and we almost always get a chorus of agreements when we state this principle to the DW/BI teams with which we work. But most DW/BI folks are technologists at heart. We like the certainty of computers and programming. It works or it doesn't; if it doesn't, we can debug it.

You can't deliver business value unless you work closely with business people. You need to understand their language and learn to see the world from their point of view. You'll be working in a non-technical, highly ambiguous, politically sensitive environment. Are you feeling queasy yet? Many of us went into the computer trade specifically to avoid such discomfort. But this unsettled environment is what the DW/BI system is all about. You must develop the business knowledge and people skills right along with your technical skills in order to meet the needs of your business users. We realize the entire team will not become smooth-talking MBAs. However, someone on the team must have strong business and communications skills, and everyone will be more effective if they work to develop some of these skills.

So, while many DW/BI teams and consultants pay lip service to business value, the reality of their day-to-day behavior is that technology ...