Business Intelligence (BI) is all about helping people at all levels of your organization to get the information they need to make faster, better decisions, which drive the business forward. Today, business intelligence is no longer the exclusive purview of executives and analysts. Everyone in your company can now have access to critical business data throughout the enterprise. Timely access to critical data can empower your information workers to become real-time decision makers who take informed actions that reflect and achieve your corporate goals. The way individuals interact with data can become a key driver of your company's success.

Traditionally, companies have purchased and deployed specialized BI tools as they were needed. Very often these tools were specific to a certain department, and the business users or developers who selected them rarely had an organization-wide business intelligence strategy in mind. Over the years, this relatively unsystematic approach has itself become a barrier to using information. As a matter of fact, according to Gartner’s CIO wish list, published in January 2006, BI is now the number one challenge CIOs are trying to deal with.

There are many reasons why the traditional approach to BI has not fully delivered on its promise to make information available throughout an organization. One reason is that the need for people to learn how to use specialized BI software has proved to be a major barrier to adoption. Another is that using and accessing BI tools has been somewhat of a local specialty, typically the exclusive domain of the finance department or business analysts. As a result, IT departments have had to devote considerable resources to maintaining separate systems, each with its own purpose and requirements, its own problems, and its own report formats. Deploying and maintaining specialized BI solutions—which sometimes don’t even yield the expected results—has often been expensive.

Microsoft Business Intelligence answers these problems by providing a single business intelligence framework that ties information together across an organization. This single framework can remove barriers to finding and using data, which helps people throughout the organization—from information worker to CEO—to collaborate and make informed decisions. It offers a familiar Microsoft Office interface that is easy to use and understand, which reduces the need for training.

Microsoft Business Intelligence is built on the proven and scalable Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence platform and is delivered through the 2007 Microsoft Office system. It includes analytic applications, scorecards, dashboards, reports, analysis, data mining, online analytical processing (OLAP), extraction, transformation and loading (ETL), and data warehousing. It is a complete solution that helps contain costs by relieving IT professionals of the need to maintain disparate BI systems.

Microsoft BI can provide solutions at these multiple decision-making levels:

Performance Management. Microsoft BI can provide a single, common overview of a company’s business processes. It uses both qualitative and quantitative benchmarks to measure and track enterprise efficiency and improves planning and forecasting. It can tie together financial, operational, sales, and human resources information to help people make better-informed decisions.

Reporting and Analysis. Microsoft BI provides tools to all users across the enterprise. Using familiar and intuitive tools, people can analyze information using business terms. People can create one-time reports on relational and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) data, or visualize and analyze complex OLAP data, without needing to understand any of the underlying data structures. That analysis can then be shared over the Web through BI portals and report libraries.

Data Warehousing. Microsoft BI delivers a single, integrated platform with a scalable and extensible architecture to meet a wide variety of BI needs. These include:

• Integration of information from disparate sources.

• Storage and management of vast amounts of detailed data.

• Analysis of information with an integrated view of the business.

Business Intelligence solutions from Microsoft can help organizations:

• Control IT costs by providing a single business intelligence framework that is easier for IT professionals to manage than disparate programs located in different departments.
• Improve collaboration and the quality of decisions by making information throughout the organization available to people at all levels.
• Reduce the need for training employees by providing them with BI functionality within the familiar and intuitive Microsoft Office interface.
• Give people an in-depth view into business operations through an integrated set of analytic applications, scorecards, dashboards, reports, analysis, data mining, data warehousing, and other BI technologies.
• Assist managers to plan and forecast work by presenting a single, common overview of a company’s business processes across departments.