Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappos.com, wrote in his book Delivering Happiness that their first objective is to Deliver WOW through Service.
In the book he described a parody of <a href=”http://bensullins.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Maslow”s_hierarchy_of_needs” target=”_blank”>Maslow's hierarchy of needs for delivering WOW.
At the bottom layer you have Meeting Expectations…in BI this is like replacing the reports users already get with a better backend database system.
The second layer up from the bottom is Meeting Desires…in BI this is when you add the functionality to some reports users have been wanting, or upping the performance of some reports to more tolerable levels. You haven't got WOW at this point, but you're doing pretty good.
At the top you have Meeting Unrecognized Need…in BI this is delivering to users a totally new way of looking at and accessing their information. Traditional BI projects would seldom reach this level within their first 3 years of execution however, with tools like Tableau Software hordes of regular business users are able to visualize their data in a whole new way within minutes of completing the install.
Furthermore, with Tableau Server, technology groups are able to deliver an enterprise class meta-data management and online collaboration platform truly enabling self-service Business Intelligence.
If you've not worked with Tableau yet I highly recommend downloading a trial and seeing for yourself. With any luck, you'll get more WOW from your data than you ever could have before with traditional platforms and methods.