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

14.4. User Support

A well-designed and well-implemented DW/BI system is much easier to use than any alternative, but it's still not that easy. The DW/BI team will need to provide ongoing support to its user community. We recommend a three-tiered approach to providing user support. The first tier is the web site and self-service support, the second tier is your power users in business groups, and the third tier is the front-end people on DW/BI team (the BI part of the group).

NOTE

You can't rely on the existing IT Help Desk to provide much support for the DW/BI system users. At best, we've found that Help Desk personnel can help solve connectivity problems. To provide real help, you need to have business users talk to someone who understands the business problems, data content, and front-end tool. Having your users reinstall the software is not going to cut it.

• Tier 1, the Web Site: We've already discussed the support-related contents of the web site in the documentation section. Having great content and the tools to find it (navigation, search, and metadata browser) is fundamental to providing support through the web site. You may need to encourage people to take advantage of the resource. It helps to have a brief demo of the web site in every class to show people where to go for help. This could also be turned into one of the cheat sheets we described earlier. You'll still get calls from people who could have easily found the answer themselves but decided it was easier to call ...