About Business Intelligence

Here's your ideal situation: everybody in your organization sees the decisions they make in the context of the big picture, and every decision is aligned with company goals and strategy. Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) can help your business get to this ideal state through three capabilities: monitoring, analytics, and planning.

These capabilities are built into Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, a powerful performance management application that provides you with the infrastructure to link people at all levels of your organization—whether they're executives, line-of-business managers, or individual contributors—to your overall corporate strategy.

Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 builds on the familiar Microsoft Office environment and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to deliver a comprehensive solution that includes the three critical components of performance management:

• Monitoring: Scorecards, dashboards, and key performance indicators (KPIs) help drive accountability and alignment across your organization.
• Analytics: Integrated analytics helps you quickly move from monitoring information to analyzing it to sharing it throughout your organization.
• Planning: A flexible framework offers powerful business planning, budgeting, and forecasting and management reporting functionality that supports critical business processes and strategic decision making.

• White paper: The Payoff of Pervasive Performance Management
  Read this exclusive report from BusinessWeek Research Services on spreading data analysis tools from the executive suite to the shop floor.
• White paper: Creating the People Ready Business - Enterprise Performance Management
  This paper is intended to facilitate discussion around enterprise performance management and how it expedites achievement of positive business outcomes in companies of all shapes and sizes.
• White paper: How the Intelligent Enterprise Delivers Performance Management
  This Cap Gemini white paper outlines how leading organizations are investing in managing information to become masters in performance management.
• Data sheets: Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007
  Learn how PerformancePoint Server enables organizations to drive execution and more effectively monitor performance through integrated monitoring, analytics, and planning capabilities.
• Webcast: Performance Management with PerformancePoint Server 2007
  Learn how PerformancePoint Server 2007 enables businesses to deliver performance management capabilities broadly by providing an easy-to-use application that is less costly to deploy than traditional solutions.