The business intelligence continuum

Ian Macdonald, BI Lead, Microsoft Western Europe explains how a three-part approach to BI empowers personal productivity and develops team effectiveness aligned with organisational goals.

A few years ago we didn’t have enough information. Technology tools were rudimentary. Data was disconnected. Bandwidth was a slow trickle. But today, if anything, we have too much access, in too many places.

The problem with many BI approaches is that they’re able to unlock only a fraction of the information inside the organisation. They’re often hard to use, harder to maintain, and restricted to a few people or groups. They’re often focused on ERP system data and do not manage the vast amount of information from other sources, internal and external to the organisation. In many situations, there are competing and disparate information systems in place, with different technologies, tools, user interfaces and data models supporting them. These fragmented systems inhibit use and make it difficult to gain a holistic view of the enterprise.

The information people really need isn’t always in the ERP system or the data warehouse. It’s in many places – documents, spreadsheets, third-party data, all the way to the vastness of the Internet, and of course, our brains, the knowledge and experience employees bring to the table.

Your BI solution should reflect the way you use information, not the other way around.

When it does, you literally empower everyone in your organisation to make better business decisions, in a way that’s relevant and immediate. It’s this velocity of informed decision-making that drives productivity and ultimately business performance.

The BI continuum
The way businesses use business intelligence software can be categorized into three main contexts:

• Personal BI. Every individual makes an impact on the overall business. When it comes to BI tools, it helps to empower employees with a friendly interface: Microsoft Excel. Excel is the most commonly used analysis tool for individual productivity, and it's the key interface people use to analyse corporate BI data. SQL Server also plays a part as a scalable, secure platform that provides individual information workers with access to trusted data that is integrated, aggregated, and easily available through familiar applications.
• Team BI. Team BI is about calming the storm. Microsoft BI goes beyond decision making to the core function of a team: collaboration. Its key component, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, was built specifically to enable team collaborative processes. Among other things, SharePoint provides the ability to centrally store, share, and collaborate with BI and non-BI content. With SharePoint, teams have access to all their structured and unstructured data, empowering every member with the right information.
• Organisational BI. Microsoft's approach to organisational BI uses the tools and infrastructure that you're already familiar with, and aligns them with business rules, enabling everyone to be attuned to corporate goals and objectives. It starts with the highly secure, scalable, and trusted platform SQL Server 2005, and PerformancePoint Server 2007 expands the core capabilities of SQL Server to include visual corporate “scorecards,” simple-to-use yet sophisticated analysis tools, and a robust engine that supports strategic planning, budgeting, and financial reporting.

What emerges from this three-part approach is a continuum of BI functionality. Microsoft BI provides a full range of personal, team, and organisational tools, tightly integrated, with the flexibility to work the way you do today.

Rich BI functionality begins with integration
Workers need information from all of those tools and systems to finish the presentation on time, or make that recommendation to acquire another company. They may not even care what technology products go into it: they simply want to know that the information in the applications, reports and spreadsheets they’re looking at is both timely and reliable, and therefore a good basis upon which to make a decision.

That’s where the power of an integrated BI platform comes into play. Because of its strong, native integration among all systems, Microsoft BI is able to provide quality data, from any data source ­– data that’s not static, but live, so that it can be used to make the best possible decision. And it’s able to make that data useful and accessible to users through the applications and interfaces they already know and understand.

Ian Macdonald has been involved in the design, implementation and delivery of business intelligence and performance management software for the past 20o years. He is currently the EMEA Product Manager for Microsoft’s PerformancePoint Server. Prior to Microsoft Ian worked at HP where he was product manager for DecisionCenter, HP’s IT Performance Management application, providing reporting, analytics and performance management information from HP’s OpenView IT system management tools and IT Operational applications. Prior to HP Ian held a number of senior marketing and product marketing positions at a variety of Database, BI, OLAP and predictive analytics vendors including Hyperion, Information Builders, Gentia Software, Norkom Technologies and Ingres.