Defining Business Intelligence for Your Organization

What is business intelligence for your organization? Great question. We would all like to run our business (and our lives) intelligently, so how do we define, find, and create a system to make this easier? Business intelligence, also sometimes known as business performance management, is the presentation of information that is pertinent and meaningful to each user and role in an organization. According to Microsoft, their combination of software provides the business intelligence tools to transform data into information and information creates knowledge for users to take action on. That is a great concept, but sometimes it is easier to consume by considering the problems that BI is trying to solve:

• Consolidation of data sources: Most organizations, even small ones, have several different systems to support their business. Typically these systems include a customer relationship management (CRM) database, accounting and payroll system, employee time tracking system, an inventory and asset database, issue or bug tracking database, and human resource database. These systems vary based on the type and size of the organization, but regardless of the number, it is easy to create business efficiencies by consolidating the data. For example, the employee is a key piece of data for the payroll system, the employee time tracking system, and the human resource database. Instead of looking in three places for each portion of the employee information, we should be able to connect the three sources into one view. With a complete view of employee information, we can make better decisions.

• Reporting key metrics: Most organizations measure their progress based on key indicators. Are they profitable? Is their customer base growing? How many new hires did they have in the last twelve months? By knowing the answer to these questions, employees can make better informed decisions. However, after all the data is consolidated into a single view, reporting metrics becomes even more interesting. If the customer base is diminishing but the number of employees is growing, there usually is a problem. So, we use BI to first provide a consolidated view and then use BI reporting capabilities to easily display meaningful metrics.

• Eliminating need for duplicate data: Disparate systems usually mean that some data is being tracked in multiple places. Is there customer information in your CRM system that you want to show along with documents for that customer in SharePoint? By using BI integration, companies can eliminate or reduce the duplicated data.

If these issues occur in your organization, it is likely that business intelligence will help create efficiencies and a better informed workforce. Because this is a SharePoint book, let’s now consider how SharePoint addresses business intelligence needs.

• Consolidation of data sources: MOSS 2007 provides the ability to link to data sources through data connection libraries and through the Business Data Catalog (BDC). Data connection libraries are libraries of links that can be analyzed by using SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services. All these sources can be combined on dashboard pages using the appropriate Web Parts and consolidated through filters that allow users to see exactly the information they need from all sources.

• Reporting key metrics: SharePoint allows you to display and report on key metrics through key performance indicator lists, Excel calculation services, and the SharePoint report center.

• Eliminating need for duplicate data: After data sources are defined in the Business Data Catalog, the columns selected can be used as special lookup columns in SharePoint lists. Additionally, you can build dashboards using SharePoint Web Part pages, and target each Web Part containing business data to the appropriate audience or role so that each user is receiving the most applicable information.

Features of SQL Server 2005 provide two key components of BI. The first is the analysis capabilities provided by SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (AS), which allows you to create online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes available for data mining. Data mining is the process of finding patterns, especially cause-and-effect relationships, in a large amount of data. For example, if you analyzed a database of call center transactions, you could determine the most effective times for reaching businesses in the Midwest to discuss upcoming training options.

The second SQL Server 2005 feature is Reporting Services (RS). This service allows you to build quick and easy reports and report controls, which you can then drop into the SharePoint Report Center for publication to SharePoint users.

To define the BI needs for your organization, it is helpful to identify your data sources, the connections between them, and the actions that users must take based on information in your organization. This exercise identifies the possible BI opportunities that you will analyze to determine if they provide efficiencies or improved process for the organization.

This chapter focuses on how to combine your data sources and create necessary relationships so information is presented to users in context. Some of your BI processing can be done by other systems such as SQL Server Analysis Services, and the role for SharePoint is to create a platform for these results.

SharePoint can integrate multiple disparate sources into a collaborative workspace, allowing users to make better informed decisions. SharePoint provides the platform to do this as well as the associated services, such as Excel Calculation Services, and Web Parts such as the filter Web Parts discussed in detail later in this chapter.

Identifying your BI scenarios

BI scenarios vary based on the organization type and/or the business processes that support it. The following scenarios are some common BI scenarios that identify the key integration points:

• Provide a complete view of an issue: If you are presenting expense reports that need to be approved, you might also want to show users the trend of expenses in the organization and provide the ability to calculate the expense versus revenue ratio. By configuring a dashboard that shows in one place the following, SharePoint can aggregate all the data users need to make approval and budgeting decisions.

  • KPI for expense trends

  • Excel services access to the spreadsheet data for revenue and expenses in the organization

  • Document library that stores the expense reports

• Cross-sell: A dashboard created for an inside sales representative should provide the information needed for the sale, such as the customer and order information, but can also be configured to show other products that are in the same product category as the one the customer is interested in, or allow the representative to find orders for that customer by date.

• Reduce overlap: If you are running a call center that focuses on informing the partner community about upcoming events, you most likely want to call people and inform them about all the upcoming events in one call. However, if your data of who to call, what events are targeted to which people, and what events are imminent are in multiple databases specific to each event, it will be difficult to prompt the person making the call with the appropriate events for that particular target. By using BI tools, you can combine data that was historically silo-ed to create meaningful information for your organization.

Business Intelligence versus Business Data Because the SharePoint features that support business intelligence also support business data, sometimes the line between these two scenarios becomes blurred. For the sake of clarity, we attempt to define these terms as we are using them in this section of the book dedicated to SharePoint and business intelligence. Business intelligence is the processing of key business data to increase the understanding of the state of your business processes and the associated data. If BI is done correctly, your business data should be transformed into useful and actionable information that you can target to users in the organization. SharePoint enables you to display and target your BI results to portal users and roles. Business data is data contained in a business application, usually in line-of-business (LOB) applications such as SAP Business Information Warehouse of mySAP ERP, Siebel eBusiness Applications, Attunity Legacy Data Access Solutions, or Microsoft BizTalk Server. Because this data is key to your organization and processes, it is often useful to make this business data available to other applications and users. SharePoint enables this bridge between business data and other applications through its Business Data Catalog feature. You can register your LOB applications in the BDC and then repurpose the necessary data in SharePoint lists and Web Parts. In addition, BDC application data becomes searchable.

Identifying actions

For each BI scenario, the goal is to drive action. Once you have identified the BI scenarios for your organization, you should define the actions for each scenario. The actions are the steps that users will take after they gain the knowledge created by the information that the BI tools provided by gathering data. Some sample actions are:

• Reporting: BI scenarios often result in reports. These reports need to be formulated so that the information is clear, concise, and actionable. In addition, these reports need to be targeted to the level of the consumer. For example, if your BI report is for store sales for a grocery store chain, you can have a district view for the district manager and store view for the store manager.

• Updating: If my business intelligence tool can spur users into action, I have created a close-the-loop circuit of continually improving process. For example, my BI tool combines all the unresolved product issues that customers have reported regardless of how or where they were reported. If you want to direct these issues to the appropriate feature owner to follow up on, you can resolve it with the customer and update that issue status to closed.

• Providing consolidated views: BI information often should be combined with other systems and data to provide users with a dashboard view of what they need to do. For example, for a customer service representative that has an order-taking system as the primary portion of his or her dashboard, including a BI component to that dashboard informing the customer service representative of the top hot items of the day, or what other things to offer with the items the customer has already selected, can improve the corporate sales and the customer experience.