Selling the DW internally

In our orgainziation it seems much easier to get budget and resources for other IT projects--our DW initives just are not considered a priority by key decision makers. Does anyone have any ideas or recomendations on selling the DW internally?

We are just about to go live with our first significant DW effort, and I want to use the opportunity to promote DW/BI internally. I'm thinking we should brand the reports that come out of the DW system--maybe even create a DW graphic logo to put on the reports--so that when our business folks receive these reports they will know that it came from our DW and not just another report off the OLTP system.

Has anyone done something like this?

A little promotion certainly doesn't hurt. What works will depend alot on your companies culture.

I've seen different things done at different companies. Branding helps. It can be subtle or brash (again, depends on your culture). Use a standard template for canned reports/dashboards, maybe with a logo or color scheme or, at the very least, some footer text noting where the data was sourced.

But, by far the most effective, is a group of satisfied users from the first roll-out. Nothing beats good word-of-mouth.

You should be publishing reports the OLTP application cannot publish today but would certainly like to. Focus on those reports, that can really drive business profitability, that cannot or will not be supported by the OLTP databases.

Our first phase includes a suite of 12 reports that are currently being produced from the OLTP system. These reports are published for each of 60 sales territories each month, which means 720 report runs. Some take so long to generate (30+ minutes each) off the ERP system they don't run them each month anymore. Others were impossible to generate directly from the ERP system, and are currently being generated using a manually-intensive Access-and-Excel data silo.

The folks in the middle--they ones that have to deliver the reports today--can't wait for us to go live with the DW. Automating the production and distribution of these 700+ reports each month will save them several days a month (and eliminate the Access-and-Excel data silo!) But because the output is the same, I'm not expecting that these reports in and of themselves are going to garner additional support/resources/funding for further DW efforts. Hopefully if we brand them as being produced from the DW we'll at least start to get a little exposure throughout the organization.

Identifying useful reports that do not exist today is a challenge in an organization with little DW experience. I know we can provide some more accurate views on profitability than are currently available. Maybe we (the DW team) just need to spit out a bunch of sample reports to use as a starting/talking point. I'm also thinking an interactive executive dashboard might be just the thing to wow the folks upstairs!

Ask for a business resource. It looks like you have the technical side covered. Make sure it's a person with some vision on how to grow the business.