Some good points here

Business Intelligence Programs for Healthcare

Some really good nuggets in this one.  The one aspect that I know that we have struggled with over time is the Data Governance aspect of the data warehouse?  Who "owns" the data, who says what it means, who gets access to it?  It is a slippery slope and always turns political, especially where there is not enough guidance by the executives. 

I really like the idea of the ecosystem as pictured here as well.  The users are not the only part of the system that you need to worry about, their managers (assuming that they are the executives) need to have bought in to the whole program so that they can direct people to it.  Without that, it is really had to achieve any sort of real ROI. 

User adoption is the fuel of your BI program. Trust, ease of use and training are the trinity of user adoption. Users need support and training.

User adoption is the mother milk of a BI system, you can have the best, cleanest most efficient data warehouse, but if  it is difficult to use, hard to understand, or, not what the users want, there is little chance for success.

Simplifying your user interface is also very helpful. Research has shown that users are sensitive to the number of mouse clicks they have to make – anything beyond ten clicks and users will complain. 

I have seen this almost on a daily basis.  We have built some of the most robust and flexible reports for our users with an insane amount of options, but what I find, is that for a majority of the time, they choose the higher level data to run, and then they cut it up themselves in Excel (I contend Excel is both friend and foe to BI).  A good analytics tool would help to eliminate this from happening, but the learning curve on some of these products (especially anything being put out by the large players) makes it a really difficult sell to the users.  I believe the best tool out there for ad-hoc analysis has to be Tableau, everyone I have shown it too has taken to it.  

Anyone else out there run into issues like this over the years?