[mead5432]

This is something I've been wrestling with for a little bit. The challenge is that if everything is locked behind a data analyst then things only move as fast as the data analyst. If a business person needs some information now, not next quarter, the challenge is managing the queue for the data analyst which devolves into a world of "rush jobs". It's all the things highlighted by the theory of constraints (The Goal by Goldratt is sooo good). You can alleviate the DA bottleneck by getting more DAs or you can find ways to help the business users do some of the basic stuff themselves.

I wholeheartedly agree that just giving a business user access to the straight database is not ideal for all the issues mentioned - they don't know the context and the gotchas in the data combined with probably not understanding how to write SQL. I think an effective data warehouse strategy with straightforward data marts of materialized views can simplify the interaction and maybe even make it really simple for someone to generate basic visualizations. A lot of business people can make basic dashboards in Excel which, worst case, could be connected to a data mart. It's not going to handle BIG data but may cover a large number of use cases for most businesses.

I'm in favor of creating some basic dashboards We've also been experimenting with embedding dashboards in internal tools that provide some slice and dice capabilities but with a high level filter. A user can manipulate and tweak a dashboard for a specific customer but to look at a different customer they need to navigate to it in the internal tools, not via the dashboard.