Capabilities
Microsoft BI Fits the Way You Already Work
The ultimate goal of business intelligence (BI) is to provide people with access to the information they need in the tools they use every day. This enables them to make better decisions, share insights with others, collaborate throughout the organization, and, ultimately, improve its bottom line.
You're already familiar with most components of the Microsoft BI stack, such as the Microsoft Office system and Microsoft SQL Server. So you know that Microsoft BI fits the way your employees already work and the way your business operates now. This allows for quicker and easier deployments, with zero interruption and learning.
BI That's Less Complicated, More Economical
The promise of BI and performance management can quickly vanish if you spend vast amounts of money and time trying to integrate a disparate set of tools and applications that are cost-prohibitive to deploy to everyone in your organization.
Microsoft BI provides a complete, fully integrated set of BI capabilities that can help make it less complicated and more economical for you to build, manage, and use BI. The capabilities range from scalable technical platforms to applications that support decision making for people at all levels across your organization.
Learn more about how Microsoft is addressing each of the following broad capabilities of BI.
- Data integration
Your organization accumulates a lot of data, and it's probably spread across multiple databases and operational systems, making it no easy task to access the information when you need it. By integrating your data into a unified database or data view, the data integration services of Microsoft BI can help you manage it all and get down to the real task of making sound business decisions.
- Data Warehousing
If your company's data is like that of most companies, it resides in many places, such as multiple databases and operational systems. A data warehouse is the container that brings it all together to help you get critical information into the right hands more easily. The data warehousing component of Microsoft BI provides a central location for storing data and maintaining all your important historical and current business information.
- Reporting
There are many ways to get data into a report, but that's only part of the solution. An effective report creates a compelling story and communicates with clarity to audiences large or small. Microsoft BI can help you get there with informative reports that lead to sound decision making.
- OLAP
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) provides business users with access to data optimized for non-technical information workers for easy navigation, analysis, and reporting. Microsoft's industry-leading OLAP engine not only combines your data for easy analysis but also centrally stores your institutional business logic and key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Analysis
Getting information is often just a first step in the decision-making process. When you view a report or scorecard and notice something unexpected, you want to know why. Microsoft BI can help when this happens—and it happens often. Powerful analysis tools help people develop a deeper understanding of business information and take decisive action.
- Predictive Analytics
Sometimes you have to sift through layers of information before a key data point shines through and you reach an insight. The problem for many is that rooting out the drivers of business performance and drawing correlations among them can require using unfamiliar and complicated tools. Microsoft BI can change that with easy-to-use predictive analytics functionality that can help your organization uncover hidden trends and opportunities in its data.
- Scorecards and Dashboards
Being aligned with your corporate objectives is a constant process that requires access to sound information. Scorecards and dashboards help people monitor performance and tie goals, status, or trends in easy-to-consume KPIs. Microsoft BI integrates them deeply into its overall solution, enabling you to provide transparency and accountability to everyone in your organization.
- Planning and Budgeting
Effective planning, forecasting, and budgeting are vital for your company's success. Many organizations manually manage plans and budgets, which leads to uncertainty in the data and a huge amount of money spent on maintaining this manual process. Microsoft BI can help automate the management process without undermining the decision-making processes you currently use.
- Delivery
Microsoft BI can help put an end to the drain of time and resources that occurs when people have to hunt down pieces of information that are strewn across file shares, Web sites, intranets, databases, and individual desktops. The key to making BI data easier to consume is to use your existing infrastructure to provide a single location where your people can access and analyze data. Microsoft's integrated BI approach provides a consistent and familiar place where people can find information, share insights, and collaborate with others.
- Enterprise Search
People are familiar with searching the Internet to find information. Wouldn't it be great if searching for business information worked the same way? It does with Microsoft. The integrated search capability of Microsoft BI makes content easy to find and eliminates a lot of duplicated effort. Plus, the Microsoft BI solution keeps sensitive information secure, provides for scalability, and enables you to customize and extend your search experience.
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