DWH/BI - Integrating Data for Business Intelligence

DWH/BI - Integrating Data for Business Intelligence -is it worth the effort ?
ROI calculations apart putting a pure logic in place ->redundancy costs
and sometimes managing it another hell lot!!
Why can there be simpler ways to tackle this integration problem for purposes of Business intelligence

See below article from DM Review - a different approach-
http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1044329

Besides this there can be multiple ways/ solutions that can prove out to be cheaper from scenario to scenario the best suited way/solution may be implemented.
Best in terms of painless/ effortless transition to attain your GoaL.

Another approach that comes to my mind which is apparent opposite to the above thought process(article link) is of developing another application which interacts with and understands the meta-data ( without needing to store Real data in the warehouse )- it could be only storing relationships and accessing data from these various sources. in place of affording a new database and maintaining etl processes for the same..

ANOTHER pretty interesting read on.. BI/DWH benchmarking -
http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1044330