Business Intelligence has many aspects, but the penny drops for most managers from seeing their data visually, in one place, via a dashboard.
Visual dashboard in our Solution Accelerator
Our approach to BI is based on using the right tool for the job; this means:
- PerformancePoint for heavy weight analyses and data sets, with live drill down and views,
- Complex reporting using SQL Server Reporting Services
- Intuitive Dashboards for rich visualisation and user interaction
- Rapid BI for quick, flexible and cost effective dashboards and collaborative BI using existing reports and assets created in Microsoft Excel, for ad hoc reports and quick turn round reporting needs
- SharePoint KPI lists where simple RAG indications are needed.
- PowerPivot for high performance pivot tables and views in SharePoint and Excel
- Integration of existing BI tools(Cognos, Qlikview, etc) where needed.
This spread of tools is presented to the user in one or more personalised and interactive SharePoint dashboards, providing a consistent, ‘at a glance’ view of many factors that busy managers can act on and which the analysis team can rapidly alter and update to show the current state of play/business needs.
The Business Intelligence stack
Adopting a range of tools has several advantages. Different tools are suited to different tasks, so a dashboard technology, such as Intuitive, provides more power around visualisation and interaction compared with Reporting Services, which focuses on data manipulation.
Although high end tools such as PerformancePoint can achieve many of the needs of an organisation it is a complex and challenging development tool, which is reflected in the skill level and cost of those able to develop BI solutions using it. Simpler tools such as Rapid BI put the presentation of data into the hands of the analyst team and allows for much more agile report development and allows iterative developments that are immediate and manageable. Solutions created in Rapid BI etc can then form the foundation for further development in the ‘Big BI’ tools.
We also recognise that different users assimilate information in different ways, so it’s important to provide visual thinkers with graphs and charts, while finance staff often get more value from a list or table and hands-on staff often need to interact with the numbers to make sense of them. A good dashboard allows different ways of viewing the same data.
In this way organisations can have a roadmap to their Big BI deployment, while delivering appropriate scale solutions to the needs of today.
Components of Business Intelligence
Data
- Custom and legacy databases
- Excel
- SharePoint lists
- Data warehouses and data marts
- External data feeds (via web services etc)
Dashboards:
- Provide important, related information in one glance
- Can show summarized or detailed data
- Can be targeted to specific audiences
- Allow interaction – drill down, get details
- Commonly show scorecards composed using KPIs
KPIs can be built using:
- Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (KPI Lists)
- Microsoft PerformancePoint
- Microsoft Excel
