The thinking enterprise

Business Intelligence (BI) can be defined as tools and techniques that allow a company to understand its current performance and find out what needs to be done to reach performance goals. That is a broad task and can include a combination of technology solutions such as Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to gather, store and manage operational information, SharePoint and Excel for collaborative or individual analysis and Microsoft’s PerformancePoint Server to provide a platform for Business Performance Management, including scorecards and analytics, planning, budgeting and consolidation.

Interest in BI has been growing since the early 1990s. The early business driver for the use of IT was to reduce costs by automating repetitive business processes, but that is changing as companies move towards using IT to gain competitive edge. With an insight into performance and how their customers and suppliers behave, companies can improve their business models and processes, better predicting market change, improving business performance and effectiveness.

Generally, BI technologies can be used to support business performance initiatives within the corporate environment. Management methodologies like Balanced Scorecard, Six Sigma and others provide a framework for measuring and managing business performance via key performance indicators. BI can provide the mechanism for gathering, managing and analysing the underlying business, delivering the results though easy to use and understand scorecards and dashboards.

What’s the benefit?
Once a problem area is identified, BI tools can be used to investigate and initiate change. For example, if the average basket value of an online store is declining, then if the company knows how its customers behave it can generate more revenue from each visit. This knowledge is derived from data generated by operational systems, gathered and analysed using BI tools and techniques. The vendor can suggest other things a customer might like to buy, other than those on the customer’s original shopping list, based on what similar shoppers are buying. Using BI to understand and then guide customer behaviour means the company can drive up the value of each online shopping experience.

When Microsoft discusses BI solutions with our customers, we often make use of a BI maturity model. The model describes different technologies, business scenarios and BI ambitions and matches that to the capability of a company to deliver those solutions to its users. This may be simple reporting from a centralised data store at the basic level, to a fully integrated strategic planning, budgeting and analytics environment with sophisticated scorecards and dashboards at the high end. The model is used to assess the current maturity of the customers’ existing BI infrastructure and make recommendations on how they can move up the maturity curve and exploit the opportunities BI brings in the most effective way for that organisation. This accelerates the return on investment in BI solutions and ensures the underlying infrastructure is in place to support the aims of the organisation. Additionally, it may allow an organisation to consolidate a number of disparate BI applications and technologies onto one integrated platform.

Real-time BI
Analysts talk a lot about real-time BI and this is one of the key strategic directions that Microsoft is pursuing. However, many companies are simply not at the level of maturity in terms of BI infrastructure to be able to implement real time BI. Microsoft BI solutions enable a company to cost effectively develop their BI maturity, gaining key business advantage from that process whilst preparing them for the challenge of Real Time BI in the future.

Real time BI will gain more traction as companies move towards service oriented architectures (SOA), like Microsoft’s BizTalk Server, where business processes are linked to deliver key business services rather than specific functions. Data generated from this activity will be available to the BI tools and technologies to measure the business of processes, discover any that are slowing down the business and make immediate changes.