Microsoft Solutions

Business Intelligence

For your organization, accurate business intelligence often equals competitive advantage. That’s why robust business-intelligence solutions are always in demand.

BI, leverage the data they’re already collecting to build more-effective business strategies. It helps in designing, deploying, and customizing business-intelligence offerings.

• Business Intelligence Platform
• Performance Management

Business Intelligence Platform

About Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) delivers on a simple promise: to improve business performance by driving better decision making throughout your organization. When you're confident that your insight into corporate data is sound, informed, and complete, you can trust that all your decisions will help you create competitive advantage and achieve corporate objectives.

But for BI to reach its potential, it must have the flexibility and functionality to extend from the individual through the team to the organization. BI must also be responsive to the different needs of people in your organization and take into account all the information- structured and unstructured, you use to make decisions.

Microsoft BI can deliver all that through three key steps that facilitate trusted, confident decision making at all levels of your organization.

Step 1: Provide Quality Data

The foundation to a successful BI solution is trustworthy data that people can access and understand easily. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is the BI platform that brings all your data together, no matter where it resides, and helps you improve your data processes. SQL Server 2005 offers an enterprise-ready and proven engine that can store huge amounts of data, scale to the largest enterprise needs, and support high query loads, high performance, and clustering.

Data warehousing is one way to build and deploy a trusted enterprise data source.

Step 2: Gain Deeper Insight and Facilitate Better Decision Making

To help people work as a team, you have to provide a way for people to bring together all the information they use—whether it comes from e-mails, the Internet, a corporate data source, a hallway conversation, or any of a hundred other places.

Microsoft has made a huge investment in the 2007 Microsoft Office system, improving integration and functionality to allow you to seamlessly analyze, visualize, and gain insight into data by means of the already familiar Microsoft Office environment.

Reporting and analysis tools help information workers access and investigate the data necessary for better decisions.

Step 3: Align Decisions with Corporate Goals

The first two steps help people make decisions as individuals. This step helps improve corporate-level decision making across your organization. You can use the integrated set of tools in Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 to build a comprehensive performance management program that supports organizational decision-making processes.

Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 was built to support corporate and line-of-business scenarios—from sales to HR and operations to finance. Decision making now has a greater context that captures the workings of your entire company.

Performance management harnesses the tools, applications, and data involved in decision making, helping to align strategies, people, and processes

The Result: Unlocking the Potential of Your People

Individuals have access to high-quality data. They can make better decisions and trust that their decisions are aligned with corporate goals. Microsoft BI supports business environments from small to enterprise. It grows as you grow, and it's a small investment for a large return on trust that can help you build your business's success.

If you're going to unlock the potential of all your employees, your teams, and your organization, you need more than one tool, data source, or application. You need a BI solution that allows for flexibility with the security, administration, and centralization that the IT department requires to do its job. And you need it all at a price that allows you to get the tools and the applications to everyone in your organization.

The Microsoft BI solution delivers a full range of personal, team, and organizational BI tools, tightly integrated, that work the way you do today.

What Is Personal BI?

If business intelligence (BI) is going to fulfill its promise of enabling better decision making across your organization, it must be available to help all employees as they solve critical business issues daily.

Personal BI is based on people's need for immediate information. It is content created "for me, by me"—such as an Excel spreadsheet, an e-mail, a PowerPoint deck, or a Word document—and it's usually related, even if loosely, to team and corporate goals.

Every Individual Makes an Impact

So how do you equip individuals to access and incorporate relevant data, turn their hunches into insights, and turn their insights into decisions that impact the business? Put BI in everyone's hands.

You'll enable critical decision making that is local, relevant, and immediate. And increasing the velocity of your decision making will help you drive productivity and improve business performance.

It helps to have 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 analyze corporate BI data. Excel helps decision makers move the decision-making process forward by putting together the centralized, secure data from a corporate BI system and the disparate data they receive daily.

SQL Server is the scalable, secure platform that unifies data. It provides individual information workers access to trusted data that is integrated, aggregated, and easily available through familiar applications like Excel. SQL Server provides the structure for trusted decision making.

What Is Team BI?

The lack of centralized information can be a big deterrent to effective team business intelligence (BI). Too much critical content is locked away on desktops. Too much time is spent using e-mail as the primary collaboration tool. Too many versions of spreadsheets, presentations, and documents are floating around your team's work spaces. You need information in one central place.

Another inhibitor of effective team BI is forcing people to go outside their daily workflow to perform BI processes. If you want to analyze information from your team's budget, get the latest version of a scorecard, or see the latest PowerPoint presentation, you should be able to do it easily and in context.4

Centralize Team Information with SharePoint

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. With built-in workflows, you can easily assign tasks to and organize the priorities of every team member.
• Integrated enterprise search.
• Lock-down analyses.
• Information sharing over the Web.
• Complete zero-footprint access to critical business information, with security by role, group, and individuals.

Enabling Teams Through SQL Server Robust Enterprise BI Platform

Microsoft BI knits all your data together with SQL Server. The foundation of an organization's BI architecture and fully integrated with the rest of the BI stack, SQL Server ensures that everyone can easily access, consume, and publish data to SharePoint. The seamless integration between SQL Server and SharePoint enables true team collaboration and information access.

What Is Organizational BI?

Organizational BI establishes the corporate context for how information is viewed by everyone at all levels of an organization. Centrally managed and secure, an organizational BI solution supports corporate and strategic planning by providing a consistent single view of information and key performance indicators. For broad adoption, organizational BI solutions need to support business processes as part of the fabric of how people perform their daily work.

Microsoft's approach to organizational BI starts with the highly secure, scalable, and trusted platform in SQL Server 2005. Whether you are integrating data from multiple data sources, building a trusted data warehouse, producing high-quality managed reports, or seeking OLAP for data analysis, SQL Server provides the infrastructure.

PerformancePoint Server Extends the Core Capabilities

Microsoft's latest investment in BI, PerformancePoint Server 2007, expands upon the core capabilities of SQL Server into a comprehensive approach to managing corporate performance. Those capabilities include:

• Corporate scorecards to provide a visual guide to monitor progress against organizational goals.
• Simple-to-use, sophisticated tools to analyze data.
• A robust engine that supports strategic planning, budgeting, and financial reporting.

Microsoft's approach to organizational 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.

Integrating with Team and Personal BI

The Microsoft BI platform and PerformancePoint Server provide the framework and functionality to support the corporate processes but also feed smoothly into personal and team BI decision making.

For example, if you have a question related to your individual role, you can open Excel, access your corporate data, and conduct some quick analysis. If you come to a conclusion that you feel impacts the direction of some of your team's upcoming projects, you can share the analysis and your team can adjust its plans and reallocate resources. The change in direction ensures you are on track to deliver on the goals at the corporate level, and changing plans has positively affected budget and strategic planning.

Performance Management

Built on the proven business intelligence platform of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is an integrated performance management application that helps make it easy for you to:

• Monitor the performance of your organization.
• Analyze the results.
• Plan for the future of the business.

All of which contributes to aligning everyone in your organization to company strategy. Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 brings the performance management process into an easy-to-manage centralized environment while giving you the flexibility to work with familiar products like Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

What Is PerformancePoint Server?

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is an integrated performance management application that enables you to monitor, analyze, and plan your business.

By providing flexible, easy-to-use tools for building dashboards, plans, and budgets, Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 can help everyone across your organization make informed business decisions that align with companywide objectives.

The Confluence of SQL Server 2005 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System Helps Drive Performance

Most people prefer not having to learn complicated new applications. And organizations prefer to avoid investing IT hours and training time to support new tools that have little chance of widespread adoption.

The infrastructure of PerformancePoint Server 2007 is built directly into the environment on your desktop today—Microsoft Office. Your people will not have to learn new software. They can use applications they already know, like Microsoft Office Excel and Office SharePoint Server.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 is built on top of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, a proven platform for business intelligence, data integration, and reporting. SQL Server 2005 offers you a highly secure performance management environment and scales to support as many users as you want to include in the performance management process.

As the application layer behind the scenes, PerformancePoint Server 2007 provides the tools and connections to make Microsoft Office the interface for decision makers, SharePoint Server the way to deliver information, and SQL Server 2005 the data integration and collection engine.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 can help you pull all these components together to build and deploy an integrated performance management program.

Virtual Experience

View an interactive virtual office demonstrating how PerformancePoint Server 2007 can be used in an organization.