Hello. I am curious as to people's thoughts on the role of power pivot in a certain stage company.
Our company has large problems with data. Recently a data warehouse has created (Pentaho) but it only provides certain things and is not very flexible and the training has been poor, so the adoption (and value, at least to me, is very poor). Additionally, every time a change is requested it doesn't seem like it would be made anytime in the near future. The value in it is that it does provide the one source of truth (most of the time haha) but that doesn't eliminate the fact that it's not so much about truth but rather the myriad of rules for data and people not understanding what they are pulling.
I LOVE powerpivot. I used to get granular data out of webi business intelligence queries and then export into regular excel and it would be a nightmare to work with the data. PowerPivot makes that much, much easier.
Here are a couple of questions that I have:
1) Does powerpivot compete with our datawarehouse tool? I feel like powerpivot is a much better tool for us at this moment in time. However, it doesn't really eliminate the problem of not being able to access the data easily. I still have to download data from webi, which is not particularly easy (and most people don't know how to use it). The data warehouse is much easier to grab information, but the problem is that it doesn't have all the information.
2) What would be IT's problems with Powerpivot and how do I get them to buy in?
3) When the data warehouse advances to it's ideal vision (if that ever happens) is Powerpivot still useful?
4) Is there a way to get powerpivot to lie on top of the company's databases? I can never get access to the company's databases (which I believe are the source of our data warehouse) because they say it is too difficult and I could mess soemthing up, even though I'm willing to be trained slowly. Is there a way for them to just provide me with certain data (via queries?) that refresh automaticall, so I don't have to create a query in BoB when I want to do an analysis. I've actually been trying to create my own "worlds" in power pivot but it is still a chore to have to go to BoB whenever I want to add columns to my table in Powerpivot.
Thoughts appreciated