I'm always very wary of 'strategists'. Most 'strategists' I've dealt with (about 2.5 in total) are only good at one thing and that's generating enough FUD to keep themselves in a job.

But ignoring my cynical view and assuming your strategist actually wants to add value, I make these comments:

I work with a 'Enterprise Data Warehouse' for lack of another term. It contains:

1. Replicas of source systems, used for operational or 'detailed' reporting

2. Above this there is an 'ODS' layer which adds centralised reference / master grouping data to the replicas

3. Above this there are a couple of 'datamarts' which are basically star schemas.

4. Above this there are cubes

5. At the top we have a BI tool running reports from each of these four layers

Every level has certain types of business rules in it. These rules clean, conform and combine data. The higher you go the 'richer' the data. The lower you go the more 'operational' the data is.

I can tell you all of our dashboards run from cubes, as that is the richest, most consistent layer to get data from. Most of our KPI's cannot actually run from source system data, as there is not enough info or context. But we do drill from the dashboard all the way back to your source systems and that is of great value.

Even though your dashboard does not obviously have dimensions and measures in it, that's effectively what they are built from, unless they are purely operational KPI's (as opposed to cross system KPI's)