In today's highly competitive business environment, companies must achieve alignment, integration, and optimization of their people, processes, and technologies to remain competitive. Although competitive strategies are increasingly based on business data analytics, extracting insight from large volumes of information presents a growing challenge.

According to "Enterprise Computing & Networking," by Robert Lancaster, Jamie Gruener and Kelly Ring in the April 2004 Yankee Group Report, the compound annual growth rate of digital data that must be stored has grown to 39% in 2006. Deriving insights from this amount of data requires simple, easy-to-use tools that can access financial and operational information and integrate it with familiar applications. In addition, this rapidly changing world requires decisions to be made quickly, so it is essential that employees at all levels of your organization have the tools to gain insight and make effective business decisions.

How well your people work together to make decisions is a key element in determining your business success. Your people are your key differentiators in the marketplace. Giving them the right tools to make the right decisions at the right time is a great way to drive business performance.

Performance Management Solutions Address Business Intelligence Challenges

One of the most critical organizational challenges is to align performance management objectives with strategic goals. Providing integrated business intelligence (BI) tools that are available to your employees at all levels is crucial in an increasingly knowledge-driven economy.

For example, a Chief Executive Officer may want to instill a corporate culture that embraces a structured performance management model that aligns the activities and work objectives of employees with overall business goals. You want to know that what your employees are working on-and what they will achieve-will support the company's direction. Your Vice President of Operations may want to provide better insight into the business, to help employees stay aware of project status or be able to escalate issues for help. Your Vice President of Sales may want better visibility into sales efficiencies, to focus on deals that help grow business with your most profitable customers.

The Microsoft view is simple: BI capabilities should be people-ready. This means that performance management solutions, based on the right BI platform, should enable employees-from directors and managers to service agents, business analysts, and information workers-to position your company to stay ahead of your competitors.

Implementing broadly used BI tools has been a challenge for most businesses. Traditional BI tools are designed for use by trained IT professionals or specialized business analysts, and often do not scale for general access. Consequently, typical use of these traditional tools has been limited to specific users and specialized uses such as subject-oriented queries, reporting, and analysis of historical data.

In contrast, performance management solutions built on the Microsoft BI platform provide enterprise-wide, near real-time, end-to-end performance management capabilities. These capabilities enable access to information that has the right level of detail, limited latency, and is useful for both historical and forward-looking analysis. Microsoft-supported solutions enable a comprehensive performance management approach designed to provide critical business information to the broadest number of users through the familiar and easy-to-use Microsoft Office system environment.

Solving the Business Intelligence Challenge

With Microsoft BI capabilities, companies can realize improved business performance by addressing widely applicable scenarios such as:

• Improving planning, budgeting, and forecasting.
• Improving sales and marketing ROI.
• Better portfolio management.
• Improving operations.

Performance management solutions built on the Microsoft BI platform can help your business share information across the organization more securely and make it easier for people to work together efficiently. Better performance management improves planning and strategic alignment, and helps people make more effective decisions through access to consistent, timely, and more comprehensive information.