Ahh - this "requirement" - seems like it has been posted every month for the last 5 years in some form or another.
Honestly, if you have a requirement to download that much data for people to use in Excel then you've missed to point of BI and how a BI tool fits in. Instead you should be asking about what people do with that data in Excel. What are they doing to it once its in there? Most likely they are continuing to alter it, add to it, etc in order to produce some other reports. You should be targeting the output from Excel, not the input to Excel. Otherwise, you aren't really doing anything - replacing one dump for another. BI is a aligning with and improving business processes, not providing access to raw data. The BI tool is very
rarely the end of a business process - there is a longer process to consider. Not improving it and re-doing the same poor process truly is "paving over cow-paths".
Here is an example I came across that illustrates this:
I showed up to a project and they wanted to download 100,000 records. The "report" requirement had already been written up as such. Instead of doing that however (I don't follow orders very well), I contacted the person who requested the report and asked what she was doing with that data. Turns out she had to combine it with another smaller data set to produce a report which our BI system could not. The solution was to add that small data to our system and produce the result directly in OBI.
Benefits of this are many:
1 - She is now freed up from doing
this rote manual low-value-add work. Analysts should be doing high-value add work.
2 - The results are available faster than ever before
3 - The output is shareable with many very easily as it is in a dashboard and doesn't require a posting to a shared server or email threads.
4 - The process of producing the output has gone through an extensive QA process, thereby cutting down on manual human errors and improving accuracy
5 - The results are now integrated into the bigger BI environment, and can now be mixed and match with other metrics. Now some real analysis can be done as opposed to a static report
6 - You might even be able to improve the frequency and timeliness of the results as it can be done say nightly as opposed to weekly/monthly. Perhaps the current frequency is not really good enough for the business, but
that's what they had to settle on due to the manual nature of the process.
I think if you discuss these benefits with a user, they will most likely gladly cut out the boring work they have to do. If they have job security issues, then you'll have to go higher up to their management, and explain how their team can be more productive.
Jeff M.