Jason Morales' Microsoft BI Update v.15

SSAS Newsletters

Montly Microsoft BI newsletter by Jason Morales

Jason Morales' Microsoft BI Update v.15 - December

SSAS Newsletters

Jason Morales' Microsoft BI Update v.15 - December

Written by Jason Morales

Friday, 14 December 2007 18:16

Hot Topics

Business Intelligence for Everyone?

First of all, why? Business Intelligence implementations should enable business users to make better decisions quicker.

By ‘better’, we mean informed decisions supported by relevant information.

By ‘quicker’, we mean that information is more timely, more accessible and easier to understand.

Your organization will be more productive, more effective, and will grow faster when all employees are equipped to take the rights actions to succeed. When your organization’s systems and processes are aligned to enable quicker recognition and response to new trends and situations, the value of your organization rises and becomes more measurable.

What’s the value of a better decision? How does Microsoft help your organization get there?

Functionality

Microsoft Business Intelligence applications provide the necessary functionality to accommodate the critical BI needs of your organization. Your organization has a spectrum of users who each have a variety of needs, for example:

Executives – responsible for making informed business decisions
Analysts – responsible for understanding the data and conveying information insights to others
Engineers – responsible for product development
Field Agents – responsible for engaging customers

Each user applies different levels of functionality depending upon the situation – each user is a power user for some things and a casual user for others. How do you provide an application that sufficiently meets the needs of all users through the same system?

Business Intelligence does not live within one application. When BI is successful, users are compelled to act on the new insights, to dig deeper, to collaborate, to input new information, to share documentation, to respond quickly.

The Microsoft Office System offers the most complete framework to accommodate all of these functions.

Integration

It is certainly necessary to provide a platform capable of bringing a variety of data sources together so they can be accessed through a unified application. The Microsoft Platform offers market leading tools for data integration.

BUT, in order to roll out a BI initiative throughout the entire organization, the applications must integrate with the way people work every day. How does your organization’s BI application enable employees to integrate their work with the enterprise so that they can demonstrate their performance and alignment with corporate objectives?

Business Intelligence activities – such as reviewing or updating reports, analyzing data, comparing trends – only comprise an aspect of the typical day, they don’t encompass all of our daily activities.

The Microsoft Platform is designed to comprehensively integrate Business Intelligence with all of the other key activities that we perform everyday to accomplish our tasks and meet our commitments, activities like email and collaboration, workflow, search, document management, and planning.

Economics

If it’s too expensive to equip all of your users with licenses, then you need to choose who to equip. By selecting one group of users to equip and leaving other users out, organizations create major ongoing issues, such as:

Higher IT costs - those who you don’t equip compete with your organization’s IT strategy and infrastructure by pulling information into desktop databases and applications, by developing custom processes for their team or dept. that become entrenched and difficult to integrate into the enterprise; these types of deferred costs often increase exponentially for every user group left out.
Opportunities missed– who will be responsible for your organization’s next innovation? which clients are being overlooked? which production issues could have been caught months earlier? will extensive reconciliation cycles lead to surprises effecting our bottom line or budgets?
Reporting Treadmills – more time is spent organizing information than understanding it, requiring higher headcounts, data latency, greater risk of error.
Operations don’t align with Strategies – employees become overwhelmed by what they need to do and completely unaware of why they do it and how they can improve their contribution.

Some analysts note that the typical large organization owns on average 6 different BI systems – and still, more than 70% of information workers don’t use BI systems. What does this tell you about the traditional BI economic model?

Microsoft has introduced a new economic model for Business Intelligence that delivers enterprise grade BI functionality and integration at a fraction of the cost of traditional BI vendors.

*** Note: the perspective provided above has been collected from a variety of BI-related resources and discussions, but the views expressed are mine and do not represent Microsoft’s official position.