Sounds completely reasonable, and yes, the data side of the house usually has the least contact with the mob... errr... business... errr... end users. BI definately needs to work with multiple teams to understand how the business itself works, then with the developers and DBAs to determine what data is available and how it's captured, and then meet the two in the middle. It's DEFINATELY a people type of position, at least until you get all your nuts and bolts in a row.

To complement the above recommendation, which is a good one, I'd personally start with SQL Express (free) before going on to SQL Developer. SQL Express gets you the basic engine and you can get your data into it. From there, you can start looking into normalization and getting your data more intelligently laid out. Always work with what you know first (I started by cataloging items in a game I played and watching internal market rates). From there, you can start doing those same puzzles in SQL instead of in Excel.

Now, to the BI side of things, from there you can hook a pivot table off your SQL data and hand that around to the office. It's a good way to start to get involved in things like that. With Developer, you're restricted to only personal access and things like that. Express is a bare bones install of the engine but it will allow you to share, legally, anything you build with everyone else information and results that's not in a development state with intent to move to a licensed server.

These are the topics I'd immediately look into to determine if you really want to get involved with SQL Server (and SQL/Databasing in general):

Normalization

Indexing and optimization (google keyword to get started: Clustered index)

Those two will start you down a theoretical core design principal and a first-step design component that will help you understand the nuts and bolts of what you're looking to get involved in. They'll also lend you a thousand more keywords to take yourself out on a wiki-walk. If something in particular in those strikes your fancy and you're not sure what to look up or where to go with it to find more information, let us know, we'll happily help you determine what keywords, blogs, or whatnot you'll want to do more research on. Sometimes it's just hard to find the right lingo.