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Business Insight

For four consecutive years, Gartner Group surveys have shown that CIOs rank business insight as their top priority. And in a recent analyst poll by CIO magazine, business insight was ranked second in the list of spending priorities. Clearly, there’s a strong desire—and need—for better insight, and Microsoft business insight solutions can help you get it. The ideal business insight solution allows you, with a relatively small and incremental investment, to extract data from your existing IT systems and analyze that data in a variety of ways to measure performance, identify cost-cutting and growth opportunities, and increase agility.
 
What stands between most businesses and better business insight is budgetary concerns over the cost of implementation, adoption, and maintenance. Other concerns include data accessibility, data security, and solution scalability. Microsoft business insight solutions remove these roadblocks, helping you drive better strategic, tactical, and operational decision-making throughout your organization.

THE MICROSOFT SOLUTION
With the primary goal of putting business insight capabilities in the hands of everyone who needs them, we built our business insight solution on SQL Server, SharePoint, and Excel with PowerPivot – tools commonly used  throughout most organizations  which provide many benefits:
 
  • SQL Server includes powerful reporting and analytics capabilities.
  • PerformancePoint Server with SharePoint allows users to drill through data via web browsers and to publish reports and documents to central libraries where data is easier to track, store, and manage.
  • Excel uses IT-defined data connections and data mining add-ins so analysts can quickly perform ad hoc analyses to identify real-time trends that aren’t visible in canned reports.
 
Productivity improvement is central to our business insight solution, enabled primarily by the ability to create customized, interactive dashboards that collect data from multiple sources (structured and unstructured) and present it in one timely, consolidated view. Beyond that, PerformancePoint Server scorecards keep people aligned with goals and drive accountability, while strategy maps allow management to monitor performance against specific metrics. And every step of the way, SharePoint integration allows people everywhere in the organization to easily find and share data, collaborating whenever and wherever they need to.

Self Service Business Insight
One major hindrance to enterprise-wide business insight adoption is that effective business insight requires collaboration and consensus among IT and end users, a challenge that often finds IT and end users at odds over the creation of ad hoc and custom data analysis (end users’ prerogative) versus consistent governance over the ever increasing volumes of data crucial to making the smartest business decisions (IT’s prerogative). 
 
As such, businesses today are faced with a challenge: How do they support the trend of end users creating their own business insight analysis, while still allowing IT the governance to effectively support a flexible business analytics environment and realize wider adoption of effective business insight?
 
Microsoft worked closely with customers and partners to address and create solutions to address this challenge.  Customer research revealed that no matter how much emphasis IT departments put on building data analysis solutions for their end users, users were still satisfying their own analysis needs, largely through Excel spreadsheets.  Microsoft recognized that end users had transient and sudden analysis needs that an IT organization could not always plan for or quickly react to.  And, in turn, IT was frustrated by end users ignoring solutions proposed by IT and reverting to using Excel.  The chasm between end users and IT to collaborate effectively is, actually, a contributing factor to the ineffectiveness of enterprise-wide business insight solutions.

Pervasive Performance Management
Delivering actionable business intelligence remains a top priority for IT organizations. CIOs continually tell Microsoft that they need more tools and new capabilities to deliver and succeed with business insight. Their wish list includes the capabilities to give users the power to drill into any aspect of their business on their own, manage enterprise information, encapsulate data sources, gain control over user-generated solutions, and create intuitive, shareable reports and analytical applications. In short, organizations need new technologies and solutions to expand the reach of BI from traditional organizational domains into team workspaces and personal BI areas. Pervasive Performance management is about empowering users with analytics from within LOB applications.
 
A comprehensive, end-to-end business insight solution must include several distinct platforms: a data infrastructure and business insight platform, a business collaboration platform, and a business user platform. SQL Server 2008 R2 establishes the data infrastructure and BI platform, integrates with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to supply a reliable and secure collaboration platform, and extends Microsoft Office 2010 to provide an intuitive and familiar user platform with powerful analytics capabilities. Together, SQL Server 2008 R2, SharePoint Server 2010, and Office 2010 form the Microsoft Business Insight Solution Stack. The Microsoft Business Insight Solution Stack is a cornerstone in the Microsoft business insight vision to provide business insight to all employees, leading to better, faster, more relevant decisions.

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 Microsoft Business Insight Benefits
 
  • Provides powerful business insight capabilities via familiar tools that promote rapid, widespread adoption, enable collaboration, and reduce dependency on IT staff
  • Improves overall productivity via easily customized, self-service dashboards that increase visibility and help people maintain alignment with goals and objectives
  • Enhances IT efficiency by easily consolidating multiple data sources, simplifying scalability, and reducing overall system costs and complexity
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