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

8.2. The Value of Business Intelligence Applications

Developing BI applications sounds like a lot of work. Before we dive into the details of creating these applications, it's worth reviewing the value you get from them to help justify that work. As it turns out, they add significant value in several ways.

• Business value: The process of identifying and creating BI applications based on business requirements almost guarantees that you will provide something of significant value to the business.

• Broad access: These applications provide data warehouse access for a broad, important user community. Remember, 90 percent of your knowledge workers will not develop the technical skills and data acumen needed to build their own reports. You must provide them with a means to get the information they need to make informed decisions.

• Early impact: BI applications demonstrate the value of the DW/BI system from day one. Business users across the organization can take advantage of the initial business process dimensional model as soon as you deploy it.

• Data validation: BI applications help validate the data warehouse content because they represent real-world analyses that bring together dimensions and facts in a way that hasn't happened prior to this point. That is, the ETL developers and data quality folks have been mostly focused on tables and columns. The BI applications bring the whole business process dimensional model together from a business perspective. For example, a report that compares ...