Most businesses have plenty of data—whether it is in the form of market intelligence, customer information, or operational information such as cost figures, sales volumes, operational efficiencies, or other key performance metrics. And the amounts of data continue to grow as more systems are added and an increased focus on governance requires more information to be retained. In order to gain a competitive advantage in today's business environment, leaders must have a way to use this information to streamline operations, find new markets, increase revenue, and develop business relationships.

Why Share More Information with Employees?

When employees have up-to-date and reliable information, they can make better decisions. Giving employees the tools they need to find the right information at the right time in a format they can use will help them make faster and more relevant decisions. Aggregating all pertinent information helps key business leaders to make strategic decisions. When top-level management can view real-time information, they can make key strategic decisions based on the most relevant, reliable, and current knowledge of their business. This leads to better top-down corporate strategy. Effective decision making aligned with corporate strategies can lead to improved business performance. By being linked into the facts on the ground, operational leaders are able to see reliable, real-time data on crucial everyday issues. Organizations will see fewer missed opportunities and work together to meet their goals when they can make more informed and quicker decisions based on their strategic objectives.

Data is most valuable when it can inform and influence a particular decision. This value manifests itself in the ability to connect decision makers-at all levels-with up-to-date, consistent, and relevant information to make better, faster, and more significant decisions. With performance management applications, your company will have the capabilities to put your data to use.

Helping employees to make better decisions more quickly is a top priority for 54 percent of business executives, who rated improved decision-making ability as the most important criteria for business intelligence (BI), according to the article, "Wave VIII: Tighter Embrace of IT," published in April, 2006 in BusinessWeek Research Services. This statistic demonstrates that helping their employees make better decisions faster is of the utmost priority. Plainly, there is a need for businesses to improve the way that they gather, analyze, and use information. Executives are recognizing this fact and acting to maximize the value of both existing and future data.

Struggles with Performance Management

Leading companies understand the importance of performance management in achieving their corporate goals. Yet, according to Keith Gile, in the "The Forrester Wave: BI Reporting and Analysis Platforms, Q1 2006," published by Forrester Research, Inc., February 8, 2006, many companies report that implementing performance management solutions is a struggle. This is because large companies can have between 5 and 15 different BI reporting and analysis solutions, with some having more than 20! Using more than one system can cause implementation roadblocks in four major areas:

• Information inconsistency and multiple records maintained in disparate systems complicate creating a consistent view. This inconsistent view can be misleading and add to general confusion rather than consensus.
• Complexity of gathering information can result because accessing data from multiple systems using specialized tools and interfaces requires expertise.
• Inability to transform information into business decisions occurs because it is hard to extract business insights from the overwhelming volume of data. Making analysis part of the operation requires major changes to the business process.
• Complicated tools require extensive training before teams can get familiar with all tool features and start providing value to the organization. Time-consuming data analysis and interpretation causes users to avoid the assigned tools and to find non-standard alternatives, such as creating personal IT applications.

These difficulties present obstacles that managers and decision makers, at all levels, must deal with daily. This makes it hard for companies to extract value while using the tools and information that they currently possess.

Knowledge is critical to any company, but in order to be truly useful, this knowledge must reach the right people. You can help everyone in your company to be more productive by connecting them to the right information quickly. Once they have the business information they need, they can transform it into insights, and translate these insights into knowledge and actions.

The power to make well-reasoned decisions is valuable at all levels. With effective information gathering, sharing, and analysis, people can act in an informed manner, which will help the company gain a strategic advantage. Here are seven key factors that provide for this advantage:

1. The ability to make better, faster, and more reliable business decisions based on integrated, verified, and consistent data provided to the appropriate decision makers at the right time
2. The ability to find new sources of revenue and profitability through predictive business modeling (such as "what if" analysis) for key enterprise data about products, customers, and channels
3. The ability to improve performance and corporate accountability by providing fact-based, reliable, and transparent information to employees at all levels
4. A holistic view of the enterprise that aligns disparate organizations, management processes, and individuals by delivering consistent and aligned metrics to goals and objectives
5. Timely insights and decision making across the enterprise value chain
6. Easy access to enterprise information through a common performance management system
7. Empowered employees who can provide business value using familiar tools to capture the right information at the appropriate time, and in a format that they can use to make decisions

A successful enterprise must have the ability to access, analyze, and deliver this information at strategic, tactical, and operational levels so that every employee can deliver business value through timely, holistic, and fact-based decisions.

Opportunity

Broad adoption of analysis-and-decision support tools is one of the keys to help ensure complete alignment up and down the organization. Achieving broad adoption is accelerated when information is delivered with familiar, integrated, and easy-to-use applications

Traditional business intelligence (BI) products are unable to meet these requirements. According to the September 2006 issue of Intelligent Enterprise, trained analysts represent only 10 to 20 percent of users who typically perform custom queries, data analysis, and reporting. This means that these traditional BI tools fall short in providing effective, forward-looking analysis; empowering effective planning; and forecasting processes to the majority of employees.

Performance management is effective when all of the enterprise's employees can easily access and use information and analysis tools to make decisions that align with overall business goals.

The Microsoft Business Intelligence platform includes applications for information workers at all levels to participate in driving business performance.

These applications can be used for:

• Strategy alignment
• Planning
• Budgeting
• Forecasting
• Consolidation
• Scorecarding
• Knowledge aggregation
• Information sharing
• Marketing Analysis
• Sales Analysis
• Portfolio management
• Reporting

When delivered through the familiar, easy-to-use Microsoft Office system environment, these tools also have integration capabilities that connect and share structured and unstructured information across the organization.