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IT Showcase On: Microsoft Business Intelligence

Quick Reference Guide

Measuring and Driving Microsoft IT Using Microsoft Business Intelligence Solutions

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Executive Overview

Microsoft IT uses business intelligence (BI) to strengthen business partnerships and connect the company. BI tools such as the CIO Scorecard, Business Partner Scorecards, and Pro-Forma Invoice help us to measure business success and the performance of the organization. Innovative business dashboards and analytics such as the internal Focus system help the organization to spot trends and enable rapid business decisions. Through BI solutions, there is simplified organizational reporting and analysis through an overall enterprise strategy, supporting great flexibility and innovation within teams while simultaneously helping us to contain and simplify overall cost of ownership.

What Is Microsoft Business Intelligence?

Microsoft Business Intelligence is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. Powerful self-service capabilities integrated into familiar tools enable users to create and share the right information quickly. BI helps MSIT make informed decisions about millions of data points in a fast-paced and intuitive manner, capitalizing on real-time analytics and better-together system integration through:

SQL + SharePoint + Office = Powerful BI

Microsoft BI technologies:

  • Scorecards – Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), Microsoft SharePoint 2010 PerformancePoint Services (PPS)

  • Dashboards - SharePoint 2010 PPS, SSRS

  • Analytics - PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010; SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)

Business Capabilities of BI Scorecards

Within Microsoft IT, the CIO Scorecard Platform improves the organization by providing business insights to all employees, leading to better, faster, more relevant decisions.

scorecard illustration

"The scorecard is our format for measuring our performance as an organization. It is the promise we make to our business groups and to corporate, to ensure that we are driving the right activities to ensure successful execution of our strategies." Tony Scott, Microsoft CIO

When combined with Strategy/Balanced Scorecard methodology, BI scorecards provide a fast and effective visual reference for leaders to drive and manage Key Performance Indicators (KPI) within the business, and help to empower business decisions. KPIs are the specific measurements that can be comparatively analyzed to determine the success of the business.

Business Intelligence Dashboards

Dashboards offer real-time drill-through analytics and up-to-the-minute business analysis of KPI using familiar performance gauge and chart visualizations.

Dashboard illustration

Up-to-the-minute drill-through analytics provide "real-time IT, real-time response" to key business drivers and leading indicators—for example, an SAP budget data visualization that provides detailed cost center utilization for the current month, week, or fiscal day.

Dashboards provide users a view of "where we are RIGHT NOW" with project schedule performance for the organization, a specific team, an individual, or for a given project.

Drill-through capabilities from high-level scorecard measures against performance targets to dashboards, and detailed row-level analytics help MSIT leadership move quickly from high-level measures to the details and respond in real time to KPIs sliding off-target. Data slicers help to further narrow the focus to specific data sets quickly and visually, helping to drive faster and more effective business decisions.

BI Capabilities Provide an Analytics Powerhouse

Microsoft built analytic capabilities into the tools that the business already uses day in and day out, including SSAS, Excel PowerPivot, and SharePoint PPS.

  • Business analytics advantages include data set correlation, predictive modeling, and factor regression.

  • Self-service analytics give every employee the power to build BI analytics, reports, dashboards, etc., without requiring sophisticated technical skills using PowerPivot, Power View, SharePoint Analytics, and SQL Report Writer.

  • Data visualizations provide the ability to see correlations and relationships in a faster and more user-intuitive manner.

  • Data animations in technologies such as Power View and Pivot Viewer allow business users to see concepts play over time dimensions, like a small animated movie.

  • Global dissemination though SharePoint, data, and management KPI can be deployed immediately to a global community. Capabilities such as Excel Services database writeback that sends details back to the database enable a digital conversation around the key performance measures and underlying content

Microsoft PowerPivot: a Self-Managed BI Solution

PowerPivot is a data analysis tool that delivers unmatched computational power directly with software that users already rely on—Microsoft Excel.

Users can transform mass quantities of data with incredible speed into meaningful information to get the answers they need. With PowerPivot, they are able to process large data sets (often millions of rows) with about the same performance as processing a few hundred rows by leveraging the PowerPivot in-memory engine and its efficient compression algorithms

Sales Analysis illustration

"PowerPivot is one of the best enablers we have to bring the power of BI to all of our employees… The Excel interface helps us to simplify the technology behind BI and truly empower the entire workforce to drive meaningful analysis from their data." Christopher Workman, CIO Scorecard Manager

Using PowerPivot, users can also:

  • Directly access trusted premium and public domain data from the DataMarket section of Windows Azure Marketplace.

  • Integrate data from a multitude of sources, including corporate databases, spreadsheets, reports, text files, and Internet data feeds.

  • Move beyond standard Excel expressions and use PowerPivot's Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) language to perform powerful data manipulations.

  • Follow relationships between tables as in a database and define sophisticated calculations using familiar and intuitive expressions.

  • Interactively explore, analyze, and create reports without depending on expert knowledge and specialty training by using native Excel 2010 functionality such as PivotTables, slicers, and other familiar analysis features.

Benefits of Business Intelligence

Empowering the workforce. Empower users to collaborate, discover, and manage their aspect of the business with the right information to make better, more agile decisions. By using familiar tools to create and share the right information, users are able to drive the business forward by responding in a timely fashion and taking advantage of opportunities as they arise.

Improving organizational effectiveness. Manage, drive, and define organizational success by aligning to key metrics and strategy, creating context-driven dashboards that present the necessary information quickly and seamlessly. Measure the critical success factors and enable everyone to create and analyze the information they need to stay informed and move the business forward. Enable accountability and transparency across the company, and remove barriers to productivity.

Enabling IT efficiency. Provide a complete, integrated business collaboration platform that empowers users to discover, analyze, and share the right information across unstructured assets such as blogs, wikis, and documents; and structured assets such as reports, lines of business, and analytical systems. Built on standards, IT can address business requirements by putting information in the hands of users, focusing on developing, maintaining and securing the systems that drive the business forward and centrally manage the system.

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