The 'fundamentals' of decision making

I am part of the team of maintenance and support of a the data warehouse of a wholesale -MNC.
My role as a PM-O from IT back office companies earlier had little scope with data warehousing as the FTE and HC equations with 'billable' and 'non-billable' calculations however ended up with revenue based on them! The normative contract documents like Project Brief Documents, Project Proposal Agreements and SLAs had their terms dictating the interim revenue in flows of the company. The standard project tracking tools and WBS analysis, time tracking, resource assignment and utilization rate play the crucial part in efficient planning of service - revenue trade off!!
A dashboard for top-management depends upon various sources of data/tools and external industry statistics or benchmarks provided by the consulting companies. In IT companies, the MIS customers are normally top management and rarely the middle level managers.

It works differently in the retail industry. The Business Intelligence customers range from executives in merchandising departments to operators in stores, customer development field executives and up to the top decision makers!!! The data analyst's role is limited to retrieving the data that is asked for, in the form of either ad-hoc or periodical, in the range of estimation of data sample size, method of retrieving data, application used for processing (basically excel/access), presentation (excel, ppt dashboard, pdf) and accuracy verification & traffic light indications. This is normally top-down approach where the managers' request for data is provided for. The value addition for data analyst's role lies in terms of providing decision KPIs on observation of vast, unprocessed data and mining the data and discovering a pattern or a trend.!!
The processed data is called 'information'. The ouput provided by data analyst becomes valuable information for decision making. The data analysis in retail industry is more dynamic, with often unpredicted patterns, seasonal steady behaviours, consumer behaviours and it is sensitive to external environments and surprises. This is a highly skilled job that requires good knowledge of business processes and decision impacts.!! Some of the steady patterns are susceptible to the methodologies of advanced statistical models. However, restricting the analysis to either micro data set or macro data set; single KPIs or KPIs from single source of data could have risk of resulting into 'blind folded' business strategies/decisions.
The scope for data mining is provided by large Data Warehouses, known for robustness and scalability!! They are normally combination of DWH with a Business Intelligence platform for access by data analysts. The data analysis is predicted as the next big outsourcing opportunity to be transferred to India and other developing countries ( Despite the risk of data security!). The ERP major SAP has already indicated their focus on Business Intelligence solutions as next big thing. After all our tomorrows are the results of what we have done today based on the directions derived by what happened yesterday!!! Makes sense..eh?