Head of the Finance department returns from an ERP vendor’s convention and sends a message to IT — “Could someone come by for a quick and easy request?” — and it’s this pilot fish who handles the ticket.

“I signed up for a special preview of the new Business Intelligence Control Panel for our accounting package,” Finance chief says when fish gets to his office. “I thought I’d invite you to drop by and download it on my PC this afternoon.”

OK, says fish hesitantly, let’s look at the documentation. He pulls down the 80-page program guide. Turns out there are 30 pages of instructions for installing a new relational database instance on a server, creating a data warehouse, setting up user security, replicating data from the production dataset in the ERP system into the data warehouse and finally connecting the new BI Panel to the newly created and populated data warehouse.

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