BI in your office

How Microsoft made huge leaps in making business intelligence more accessible to employees and more valuable to organizations.

Building on the robust BI platform capabilities provided by its SQL Server, Microsoft has launched the Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 with the goal of providing a better experience when users access and work with business information from within the suite of applications they already use to work, collaborate and manage their business.

Its just one part of wide-ranging and comprehensive BI features being incorporated into its world-renowned technologies. CXO talked to Chris Caren, General Manager of Microsoft Office Business Applications, to find out more.

CXO. Why is BI now being touted as a business necessity – hasn’t it been around for a long time?

CC. BI has been around for a while – it’s roughly a US$13 billion market today – but it’s still not living up to its full potential, only reaching a fraction of the users within an organisation who can benefit from it. It’s simply too hard and too costly, but that’s changing. The reason BI is increasingly viewed as a business necessity is because decision making happens across all levels of an organisation and empowering employees with powerful business intelligence solutions can help them have greater impact on the overall success of the organisation.

CXO. What kind of take up have you seen over the last five years and which industries have been driving this?

CC. The demand for BI tools is higher than ever. In fact, Gartner recently cited business intelligence as the top technology priority for their customers in 2006. There are quite a few public sector industries driving this: manufacturing, retail, financial, healthcare and telecommunications to name a few. The issue is around aligning strategy to action. Today, there is often a disconnect between what a company wants to achieve and the employees’ actions. The applications that help to drive the connection have been around for a long time and are typically very difficult to use.

Microsoft is providing a solution that is highly integrated with products employees already know (Office), making this connection much easier to achieve. With complex applications, end-users regularly ask: “How can I export this to Excel?” defaulting to a familiar application. Microsoft’s solution is integrated with Excel so this is automatic. Enterprises want to leverage existing tools and knowledge with technology that allows them to drive corporate goals.

CXO. Do you think end-users properly understand the complexity of BI solutions or do they take a one-size-fits-all view?

CC. Traditionally, BI solutions have been largely designed for analysts, which represents only a small subset of an organisation’s workforce. But the benefit of the Microsoft solution is that we provide a simple, familiar user experience so that end-users do not need to understand the complexity on the back-end. BI is most effective when it provides information that is relevant to the specific end-user. The Microsoft solution provides a very relevant and personalised experience that accommodates multiple profiles within a company.

CXO. Before making an agreement with a vendor, what planning/research should companies undertake to ensure they get maximum ROI from BI?

CC. First and foremost, and independent of any technology, companies needs to know what goals (key performance indicators) should be used to drive their business at each level in the organisation so they can identify what each person should measure and manage. If they don’t know the answer to that question, they’re never going to get ROI from BI investments. Secondly, companies should choose a solution that is very flexible to the way they want to manage performance management, rather than a solution that dictates how they manage performance management.

CXO. Is there a typical process an emerging company has to go through to start implementing a system?

CC. Yes. Typically companies would deploy to a few people in an enterprise and then leverage their learnings to extend deployment to the organisation. We’ve worked hard to make our solutions easy to deploy and manage. For example, with Business Scorecard Manager, the deployment effort of going from 50-10,000 users is marginal. That’s not typical with other solutions out there right now.

CXO. Where do the most common pitfalls occur?

CC. Often, companies struggle to identify what they want to measure. In addition, they forget to make BI part of the daily routine of users. BI should be highly integrated with employees’ daily routine or it will fail to be effective.

CXO. Recently, Microsoft has significantly increased and broadened its investment in BI. Can you tell us more about your new products and how they are meeting the challenges?

CC. We have significantly increased and broadened our investment in business intelligence with Office playing a major role, in addition to the great foundation that SQL Server provides. Our goal is to make BI a mainstream technology for customers by providing a simple user experience (via Microsoft Office) for accessing and working with business information, so that decision makers at all levels within an organisation can drive improved corporate performance. There are several new and forthcoming products that speak to this: one such technology, Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005, leverages the power of the Microsoft Office System to help organisations build, manage and use scorecards and key performance indicators. The product gives companies a broad view of business opportunities, through which employees can better understand business challenges, effectively and collaboratively shape solutions and quickly execute on their objectives.

In Office 2007 Excel, Microsoft is adding server side capabilities that make it easier to secure, manage and collaborate with others on spreadsheets—effectively making Excel a more secure and manageable data analysis and presentation tool. Instead of e-mailing Excel worksheets and storing them in multiple places on the network, you have one secure version of the worksheet in one place – and people can access it with just a browser or with Excel. Also in Office 2007, SharePoint products and technologies become a comprehensive BI portal for all of the BI content and end-user capabilities in SQL Server Reporting Services and Microsoft Office, providing secure access to business information in one place.

CXO. How have these improved on BI technologies already available on the market?

CC. The key is providing a better experience when users access and work with business information from within the Microsoft Office suite of applications that 400 million people know and use to work, collaborate and manage their business. In addition, we’re lowering the cost of these tools. Today, it is cost prohibitive for most companies to make BI technology available to all decision makers. Microsoft, however, offers a more affordable solution to engage decision makers at every level, which is very appealing to companies from a financial standpoint.

CXO. Aside from the technology itself, what kind of support do you offer businesses throughout the implementation process?

CC. Microsoft offers a lot of support throughout the implementation process including a comprehensive training kit, documentation, best practices papers, consulting, and case studies. We also have a very strong channel of partners who are knowledgeable and ready to engage with customers.

CXO. Once systems are up and running, what bottom-line benefits and competitive advantages can BI bring to a firm, especially by adopting your latest products?

CC. Let’s take scorecarding as an example. Corporate performance is driven by the organisation as a whole, across all activities, divisions, and individual contributors. A scorecarding system that does not have the ability to draw on every area of the company offers only an incomplete picture and delivers only a partial solution. Every system has the potential to contribute insight into key business drivers. Every process reflects costs and benefits that can be harnessed to maximise performance. Business Scorecard Manager provides the tools and platform for a pragmatic, low-risk, complete BPM strategy for high impact and fast results. It also aligns action with strategy to improve performance by enabling every employee, process and system to understand business drivers, shape solutions, and execute shared plans. A collaborative work environment where employees use familiar tools to put their insight into action can make the difference between scorecarding being just a slogan or a real and effective way to transform a business.

CXO. Recently Microsoft announced the decision to purchase ProClarity, a software company that provides advanced analysis and visualization technologies for the Microsoft BI platform. Although the deal hasn’t yet closed at the time of this interview, can you comment on what benefits customers can expect from the acquisition?

CC. ProClarity provides Microsoft with additional advanced analysis and visualization technologies, business logic-driven ‘guided’ analysis, and complementary technologies for SQL Server, BSM, Excel and SharePoint. The acquisition of ProClarity will help us build even more BI capabilities into the Microsoft Office system productivity tools people use every day. This significantly enhances the value we can deliver to customers and expands opportunities for partners to integrate high-end analysis capabilities into business applications.

CXO. How do you envisage the future of BI – what are your market trend predictions for the next five years?

CC. The cost and complexity of BI will be substantially lowered – in many cases people will use BI in their daily work and not even know it. It will, in many ways, be the way organisations develop strategy, align people to it, and manage corporate performance. Additionally, the worlds of structured and unstructured data will come together into easy-to-use tools so that all decision-makers within and organisation will have a much easier time accessing the information they need to drive their business forward.

CXO. In keeping with this, how is Microsoft continuing to develop its technologies to remain at the cutting edge?

CC. Microsoft has been in the BI market for almost a decade with SQL Server. The good news for customers is that we are increasing our investments in business intelligence substantially with the integration of Office, our core technologies, where we have a broad customer base. And we have a lot more in the works in the area of Corporate Performance Management applications – stay tuned!