Like PCD himself, it's totally irrelevant to the question.
And like PCD's answers to questions it's wrong.

But I will credit PCD for self-improvement. At least it's not a
wrong answer.

Never mind John, let PC D  be what he is, a pile of sh*.

I am afraid he forgot to take his pills again....
He is only mad because Bob called him a Pretty Crappy  Developer in another thread.

Arno R

Oops, almost forgot ---

Arno R never consulted with John Marshall on this project because John
Marshall never makes an y contributions to the newsgroup.

Hi, Jerry.

Your organization's problem is a managerial one.  And it's very common in
businesses.  However, the IT department's relationship with the other
departments in the organization needs to become one of mutual cooperation,
not the current adversarial one.

As you know, a lot of it is garbage data, because the data wasn't validated
when it was entered.  Garbage data can be worse than no data.  I worked for
a corporation that had long been managing its manufacturing at one plant
with an outdated, inflexible mainframe application, various spreadsheets,
and records on paper, and whose main customer suddenly got its budget cut to
a trickle and was looking for cheaper alternatives, i.e., a new
manufacturing contractor.  The corporation decided that BI would streamline
the management of operations at this plant for their main customer and would
help them attract new customers with their lower resulting costs of doing
business.  The plant didn't yet have the budget for the $600K+ Cognos
solution the management had decided on, but they expected to have the money
in four months.  Against the advice of IT, as a stop-gap measure till the
Cognos solution could come online, management decided to purchase and
implement Actuate for $140K+ so that they could start showing their main
customer how much cheaper such a system could be and start making better
business decisions as quickly as possible.

Of course, in the rush to implement the Actuate system, no one had time to
clean up the data, so the data went into the system pretty much as-is.
Major business decisions were made based on this system, some of which later
proved to be very poor decisions.  The Cognos solution required that the
data be stored in a different structure, which also demanded that the data
be cleaned up beforehand, so a major effort was made to do so.  When the
Cognos system eventually came online, it was discovered that some of the
earlier business decisions made with the first system were the wrong
decisions which had cost the corporation many hundreds of thousands of
dollars in unnecessary costs.  If the corporation had spent the time
cleaning up the data and manipulating it into the Cognos data structure
instead of implementing and paying for the Actuate stop-gap solution, about
40 productive employees could have remained productive -- and employed --  
because the corporation had to cut employees from the payroll in order to
pay for the first BI system and other ongoing costs, which were exacerbated
by the poor business decisions based upon the results produced by the first
BI system.

Please note that I'm not saying that Actuate is inferior to Cognos.  I'm
saying that we couldn't see how much garbage data we actually had until we
tried using it with Cognos, which forced us to clean up the garbage data
first.  Had they but known, management wouldn't have made certain business
decisions.  But hindsight is 20/20.

It appears to be "free" now, but much of it is useless in another tool, SAS,
and probably useless for other departments who may need the same data, but
in a differently structured format, and must therefore create redundant, but
parallel, systems.  Since much of the department-specific data structure is
incompatible with SAS, what will it cost to make it compliant or to re-input
the same data with the correct format into the SAS system later?  What does
it cost the departments to build redundant data systems in spreadsheets?
What does it cost to reconcile discrepancies in these multiple systems that
supposedly use/produce the same data, but occasionally don't?

Those costs aren't free, and when push comes to shove, jobs will be cut to
pay for it.  The people claiming, "I can do all this and it doesn't cost my
department a dime," don't want to be the ones selected to walk out that door
because they weren't efficient enough in their jobs, now do they?  I can
assure you that the 40 or so people that the corporation I worked for didn't
choose to have their jobs cut to pay for a system that would make other
employees more productive.  They had no choice, and neither will the workers
at your organization.  The workers at your organization need to do
everything they can to be as productive as possible so that push never comes
to shove.

Organizational management needs to get behind the IT department.  The most
effective way I've seen this happen was to show the managers in the other
departments what's going on, how it's impacting organizational efficiency,
and what the adverse consequences are.  Those managers are the ones who will
then motivate their people to work for the good of the whole organization,
instead of just their own department.  In our case, I set up five-minute
demos to show some of the extremes, but they got the picture very quickly
and most of the people who had been very reluctant suddenly became very
cooperative.  The fact that 60 to 100+ more people they'd worked with for
years were walking out the gate for the last time every few weeks was a huge
motivating factor to become visibly more efficient and more cooperative,
too, so I realize that it wasn't just my demos that made the difference, but
they helped nudge attitudes in a more productive direction.

HTH.
Gunny

See http://www.QBuilt.com for all your database needs.
See http://www.Access.QBuilt.com for Microsoft Access tips and tutorials.
http://www.Access.QBuilt.com/html/expert_contributors2.html for contact
info.