What is the state of your business RIGHT NOW? What is the direction your business is going in right now? How fast is it going that way? What are the parts of your business that are causing that to be happening? Which parts of your business are carrying the weight of the other parts over the period of the last 30 days up to yesterday? How does that compare to the same period a year ago?
I'm sure you can get the answers to those questions with your existing IT systems, but can you get the answers to those questions without it costing a penny of any staff member's time?
At least according to some of the histories, OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) was invented by Sharon Codd, who appropriately enough was married to Edgar Codd who is credited as being the inventor of the Relational Database. From a technologist's point of view this marriage is rather fitting because these technologies are so complementary to each other, like two halves of one magnificent whole.
For a number of years database developers have been grappling with a problem that keeps recurring. Information comes into a system in small pieces - individual orders, payments, deliveries, installations, inspections, customer phone calls, and so on. But information is only USEFUL in large pieces such as: "how do the sales this month compare to the same month last year?"
In order to access the small pieces of data efficiently, you want to store them as small pieces. In order to interact with the large pieces of data efficiently, you want to store them as big pieces. So in a way the needs to these two aspects of data management are equal and oposite forces on the landscape of database development.
The solution to this dilemma is as simple as it is clever... keep your information stored in both forms, and build a system of bridging processes between these forms.
The outcome of taking this approach is that it is now possible to provide information systems that give immediate (right this minute) answers to high level questions without it needing to involve the use of any computer department, administrative or accounting department staff.
This means that you can manage your business on the basis of what's real right now, everyday.