My comment is to bnordberg, we're not comparing OLAP to OLTP importance.  The original articles only announce the new era for Data warehouse DBA and demand recognitions.  For company to succeed it must leverage their existing data and use Business Intelligent to either generate new opportunity or enhance services.

Also some hospitals does utilize OLAP as a matter of life or death, example Discharge a patient of Emergency dependent on aggregated information not on OLTAP.  Also Medications dispensing is dependent on OLAP.  So as you see if OLAP goes down then you could not accept new patience unless you empty your hospital beds first.  So it is all in the design, a good Business Intelligent will use OLAP design to ease the  load off OLTP.

Thanks

Maher