Top 20 Tips for OLAP Success

The author is Nigel Pense, who coordinates the olap report every year, so he has seen more than a few things go right, and go wrong in the OLAP world. You've gotta raise an eyebrow reading these though, as a good number are completely counter intuitive. Such as, I wouldn't agree with "14. Don't assume that the Web is always the best BI architecture." or "15. Try and deliver end-user applications via Excel add-ins." Those sound pretty blurry, but the explanations af the bullets are much more rigid in recommending against using web based delivery, something I think any solution should include.

Or:

3. Don't spend forever collecting user requirements.
If you know what you're doing, you can get all you need surprisingly quickly. Focus on application categories, not long lists of mundane features which every proven product is bound to include.

To me, that is the most important part of a whole project, and increase with the cost of the project. And what is the measure of true success for the project? Newsflash: it's satisfaction of the user. If you don't consider this your primary goal, the only way the project will succeed is by accident(!)

Top 20 Tips for OLAP Success: "Here are 20 quick tips, some obvious, but others counterintuitive, which are all based on real-world experience and research data."