Effective performance management of a book-of-business, a practice and the broader firm depends on application of timely insights to decisions. The Microsoft Practice Performance solution for the Professional Services firm delivers consolidated, secure and easy-to-use reporting on business and projects, accelerates decision-making by connecting information with front-line practitioners, and combines operational and financial insights to inform strategy and drive decision-making.
Business Challenges
Some challenges that concern financial, IT and line leadership include:
Out-of-date and inflexible reporting - Too many reports from too many different information sources, complex tools and processing delays, and IT and Finance tied-up in generating vs. analyzing all of which impede insight and reduce business agility.
Guesswork and delays in frontline decision-making - Project over-runs are often identified too late to mitigate impact, critical decisions are delayed or based upon working assumptions, and business agility is impaired by slow frontline decisions.
Disconnects between business plans and operational results – Businesses experience this disconnect in various ways: difficulty managing daily activities against broader goals, difficulty in assessing profitability and growth by business segment, operational results diverging from financial forecasts, and KPIs that often reflect out-dated information.
Solutions
The Microsoft Practice Performance solution helps professional service organizations rationalize and simplify reporting, speed frontline decision-making, and connect business insights with actions. Key enabling technologies include:
- Microsoft BizTalk Server – Use BizTalk to orchestrate flows of client and project data between applications and from multiple repositories.
- Data integration
- Orchestration
- Microsoft Office 2010 – Use Excel and PowerPivot to empower users with self-server analytics.
- Interactive analytics (PowerPivot)
- Self-service reporting (PowerPivot)
- Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 – Use SharePoint for web-based Dashboards and shared workbooks
- Data Integration via Business Connectivity Services (BCS)
- Dashboards and Scorecards (Performance-Point Services)
- Workflow around Standardized Workbooks (Excel Services)
- Microsoft SQL Server – Use data aggregation marts, and analytics to mine information for business insights and obtain rich data visualization and reports.
- SQL Server 2008 R2
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
- SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) with Dundas controls
- SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
- SQL Server data warehouse edition
- Practice Performance in the Cloud – The cloud provides elastic capabilities that firms may initially consider leveraging to expedite overnight batch processing activities that tie up compute and network resources while interrupting service availability for professionals operating in other time zones. As cloud-based methods become more established, a wider range of data-intensive operations may migrate into SQL Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-based relational database offering. As well, cloud-based versions of SharePoint may also be leveraged to reduce the total cost of ownership for a Practice Performance solution.