Please let our pointy haired bossses with MBAs point their Microsoft Access or Excel at you platform and pull in whatever they need without calling up dev team in the middle of the night.
For automation and integration, as long as the source system (such as yours ) can automatically publish a usable XML schema and make a secure webservice available, we (development )are satisfied.
For decision making , the data source is used by MBAs who are well versed in Excel and Access but get stumble easily when confronted with something that they have to learn. I am not including Mathematica/R guys in this group --- they can generally take care of stuff by themselves. The folks in marketing/HR/Strategy etc. etc. -- they need to make important decisions but they cant if the data platform is not "smoothly" connectable by Excel and Access.
Hope this helps !