Ok the PowerPivot addition to the title was my work, Wayne W. Eckerson from the TWDI institute has posted a great blog post on empowering departments and business units to build their own DW and BI solutions.
Although his blog posts talks about using BI standards that are developed in the BI Competency Center and PowerPivot doesn’t explicitly forces you to make use of the certain tables or datasets from the datawarehouse. You could give access to parts of your datawarehouse using MDM or creating OData feeds of the data to supply your end user a more single version of the truth.
Some DW veterans who have gone down this path add the caveat: “trust but verify.” Although educating and training departmental IT personnel about proper BI development is critical, it’s also important to create validation routines where possible to ensure business units conform to standards.
I think is very true and you can give access to PowerPivot data to user that you have educated and know where to get their data. The validation routines can be achieved by reviewing all the workbooks they upload to sharepoint and check on the usage by using the IT management dashboard.
This blog post makes clear that the world of traditional BI is quickly changing into a more open data world, a world where PowerPivot can help you achieve this.
Check out the entire blog post here and think about how you can achieve BI nirvana by sharing your information, not hoarding it.