A few years ago, people were challenged to make decisions without having access to all the information they needed.

Technology was rudimentary and connecting to corporate data sources was difficult.

Today’s challenge is the opposite: data is on the Internet, in formal data systems, documents, e-mail, spreadsheets, and in our own knowledge and experience. We’re inundated with information that impacts how we make decisions, and we’re finding it increasingly difficult to harness the power of this information.

Limitations of traditional BI
Traditional business intelligence (BI) approaches address only a fraction of the information we use in decision making. For one thing, they’re limited to the ERP system, the data warehouse, or other transactional systems we have in place.

For another, they are often inflexible, making us adapt to them instead of conforming to the natural decision-making flow within our organisations. In the end, productivity suffers.

Further, traditional BI solutions typically exist solely on PCs in an organisation’s executive offices. They have also been very expensive, forcing executives to decide who in the organisation is able to access these systems.

BI solutions have essentially been on a tight leash, restrained, and rationed to a select few.

This has left the vast majority of people in an organisation go unserved or underserved relative to their informational needs. Ironically, this very audience is almost entirely responsible for the tactical and operational decision making that takes place on a day to day basis.

In addition, it leaves the knowledge and expertise of approximately 95 percent of most companies untapped to a significant degree.

Now however, the economics of contemporary BI solutions allow you to make sure that these tactical and operational decisions are made with the benefit of your company’s data stores.

For example, our goal at Microsoft is to massively simplify the delivering of BI to all an organisation’s employees, so that wherever they sit within an organization, they will have access to the same tools and applications that will increase their productivity and drive an organisation forward.

Our economic model takes the ‘Who should get BI?’

question out of the discussion. Our position is that BI can now effectively be unleashed – to everyone in an organisation.

Thus our goal is to transform how New Zealand companies use BI, giving every employee access to the data required to make informed decisions – in the right tool and in the right format.

The BI conundrum
To understand this, consider how your daily work fits in to what we call ‘The BI Continuum’, where information and insight flows steadily among three main categories of BI: personal, team, and organisational.

Personal BI – You often use information solely for your own purposes. Perhaps you’ve put together a brief report to see if a business deal makes sense.

It could be a visual diagram to identify if you have the right resources to get a job done on time and under budget.

Your personal BI could be an Outlook task list, a CRM call sheet, or a production report. Whatever it is, you created it to support your individual decision making within the context of your job. However, it still needs to be trusted, secure, and reliable so you can make the right decision.

Team BI – Whatever its size, your organisation has teams that drive toward common goals.

Although they align with the organisation, team needs are always a little bit different. You need a BI environment that enables you to share information within and across various groups, so everyone can make informed decisions.

A successful BI system will meet your team needs and personal BI requirements – allowing you the flexibility to collaborate within the natural flow of your work without compromising security and trust and ensuring that all team members have the latest reliable information.

Organisational BI – How does your organisation measure success? How do individuals and teams in the organisation contribute to that success?

How do you coordinate their efforts? Organisational BI is made up of the centralised analyses, measurements, plans, and reports that clarify team and individual goals.

At the same time, organisational BI is tempered by the flow of insight emerging from teams and individuals across the organisation.

Collaboration replaces silos
An example where BI is unleashed is evident in a solution we recently provided to the Maroochy Shire Council in Queensland, Australia.

Disconnected line-of-business systems and information repositories created logical and operational boundaries that led to inaccurate data and inefficient processes, reducing the effectiveness and timeliness of their decision making.

These siloed, limited access, and confined systems made it difficult for the 1,300 staff across 48 sites to gain a unified view of operations.

Compounding this problem, council staff did not have an integrated environment where they could compare notes and share data.

Working with a partner, Microsoft provided a collaboration portal using Office SharePoint Server 2007 along with Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007, providing rich presence and instant messaging services to enhance collaboration.

Their new collaborative workspace unleashes their key BI information, allowing both the council’s executive leadership and its corporate performance management team to access balanced scorecard and KPI dashboard displays that map to current performance against benchmarks established in the organisation’s corporate plan.

These data reporting and analytic tools come out of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007.

This is built on top of a data warehouse (built on Microsoft SQL Server 2005) that uses BI tools in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to aggregate information from various line-of-business systems and data repositories.

The dashboard displays red or green lights to indicate if the council is meeting the defined KPIs. If an area is off target, indicated by a red light, the council can form a task force to conduct root-cause analysis and develop an action plan to fix the issue.

The system even automatically provisions a team site in Office SharePoint Server 2007 that provides a focal point for the team’s investigation.

Improved outlook
This solution for Maroochy Shire Council unleashed their BI, allowing for more insightful decision making.

The delivering of their information in a collaborative context and the aggregating of their data from multiple business systems into a single, integrated environment now gives the council an improved ‘whole-of-business’ outlook.

Leading New Zealand organisations are showing a great interest in BI. This is not surprising given the open, egalitarian nature of our society, and our willingness to collaborate. Our culture lends itself perfectly to this new ‘unleashed’ approach to BI and New Zealand looks set to wholly embrace this approach in the near future.

For more information

Nicolas Romaniuk is Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft New Zealand’s Information Worker Group.

DDI: (09) 362 5591
nic.romaniuk@microsoft.com

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By Nic Romaniuk