1. Create a datawarehouse
2. Create a data source
3. Create a Time dimension
4. Add Indicators (the pretty bits)
5. Create KPIs
6. Create a scorecard
7. Define how KPIs rollup
8. Add a report
9. Create a dashboard
10. Publish the dashboard

Sounds so simple doesn’t it? Well, I guess, if you have planned your KPIs properly as we discussed in the previous article, it really is.

1. Create a datawarehouse

Why can’t I just get it directly from my transactional system or my existing datawarehouse, you ask? Sure you can. But let’s be realistic for a second. A scorecard is made up of Actuals and Targets and it compares unrelated data. Do you see where I’m going with this? Let me speak plainly. The data is coming from different places so it will have different, keys and structures and so on. Plus somehow, it all must relate – even when it isn’t related. What I mean by that is that you need a single Time dimension and probably a single Business Hierarchy dimension. Oh and don’t forget Scenario. By all means, if all that information already resides in an existing datawarehouse go for it, but chances are it doesn’t. And we will be building a scorecard; which is all about aggregation. So what tool does aggregation the best? A cube baby!

2. Create a data source

In PerformancePoint, you can have datasources that are multidimensional, relational (ODBC) or tabular lists (Excel Services, Excel Spreadsheet, SharePoint List or SQL table).

Obviously, the most used option is Analysis Services – and so it should be. Multidimensional sources have all that handy stuff like aggregation, optimisation and encapsulated business logic. Obviously there are circumstances where other sources are necessary, such as displaying lists or real time data but generally speaking, it’s wise to take advantage of the speed of cubes wherever possible, as I so zealously advocated in the previous step.

3. Time. It’s all relative right?

Every scorecard, pretty much, needs a time dimension. One of the joys of PerformancePoint is that a lot of the hard work is baked in for you. Bless their cotton socks! You’ve got a Time dimension in your cube (and it contains an appropriately structured hierarchy right?) so PerformancePoint just needs to know what it’s called and, as at today, which member represents “Now”. I don’t mean you need a “Current” member, I mean literally, today is 1^st July so select the member for 1^st July. Oh yeah, and it’s a “Day” (as opposed to say, a month).

* ok yeah, this shows 2002 but that’s because my sample database doesn’t contain 2009 J So you’ll just have to imagine. You can do that right?

While you’re at it, tell me which level of the hierarchy refers to a year, which a month and so on.

PerformancePoint will work out “CurrentPeriod” from here on in. Handy!

4. Indicators. The Pretty Bits

Dashboards are ALL about the pretty. If you think otherwise, well, you’re kidding your-table-loving-self. Dashboards aren’t for you. They’re for marketing people, business analysts, general managers and business development managers et al… you know the types… they just want to see things at a glance and they’ll gush and kiss you inappropriately if it looks real purdy. Lucky you. I’m generalising sure – I’ve created dashboards for financey people and other more-data-centric types but the majority of the audience is not. If they were, they’d be using ProClarity or Excel to do analysis not a dashboard. I will say though, the finance people claim to be data-oriented but show them a pretty graph (which links out to some data) and they’re putty. FTW!

Indicators are your stoplights, and smiley faces (why? Why? I ask you!) and gauges. The heart and soul of the scorecard. It’s what people look at before they look at anything else. PerformancePoint comes with a tonne of them.

The screen shot above shows the categories you have to choose from – and each category contains umpteen indicators. Plus you can add your own custom ones. Nice.

5. Create KPIs – both Actuals and Targets

As discussed in the previous article in this series, planning your KPIs is critical. There are a few planning tips I would suggest:

• For your initial deployment, limit the number of KPIs to no more than 10
• Automate as much as is humanly possible; including Targets
• Don’t try to be too clever – measure things that are easily understood by the reader
• Don’t forget Targets under the weight of ETL’ing your Actuals – it ain’t a KPI without a Target and Targets are not as easy to design
• Make sure that the readers have agreed with each other on what the measurement or business rule is to be

So you have a list of KPIs, you’ve loaded the Actuals and Targets into your datasource and now we need to create them in Dashboard Designer. It’s as simple as hitting New KPI. The designer presumes you want an Actual and a Target and it will add your previously select set of indicators to the Target.

See how under Data Mappings, it says Fixed Values. That’s what it defaults to. A fixed value. Unlikely that you want to use a fixed value and luckily it’s as easily as clicking on it to map it to your data source. You then hit change source, select your cube and map it to a measure enter some MDX if you prefer – particularly handy if you were too lazy to get your Target values into your datawarehouse and you just want to calculate them on the fly.

You can also specify how you want the KPI to be displayed on the scorecard using the Number Format column eg with commas, to 2 decimal places etc or you can let PerformancePoint work it out based on the format of your measure in the cube.

Thresholds is where we define what’s good, what’s bad, what’s ok and what’s a disaster!

Calculation is where we define how our KPIs aggregate. Sum is the default.

We probably also want to group our KPIs into objectives such as Financial, People, Environment etc so we will need to create those as well. It’s the same process as creating a KPI.

When creating a KPI or objective, on the first page of the wizard, you’ll also notice a little check box “Grant Read to All Authenticated Users”. KPIs can be used by any number of scorecards or dashboards. That’s part of the beauty of them. Say you’re developing a dashboard for a particular department and the finance team already has a dashboard which is a global view, you can re-use their KPIs and just filter it to your particular team or department on your dashboard. If however, the data in the KPI is sensitive you may never want anyone else to see it so in that case, you would untick the option. Remember that PerformancePoint is intended for development by business analysts or other technically minded super-users so the idea is that everything can be shared and re-used as needed.

6. Create a scorecard

Now we have the core elements for our scorecard so we can build it. Like everything in PerformancePoint, right-click and Add New will do the trick. There are a few templates available to you, which just sets it up with a default layout and data source mapping. The options available are:

• Microsoft Analysis Services
• Standard
  • Blank
  • Fixed Values
    Handy for creating mockups for showing customers, managers etc
• Tabular
  • Excel 2007
  • Excel Services
  • SharePoint List
  • SQL Tabular

The option you pick really comes down to what type of data source you created way back in the beginning. Mostly, I find myself choosing Blank just because it’s easier to fiddle around with exactly what I want. A browser appears on the right hand side, which shows all the objects that are available to the scorecard and you can drag & drop them onto the scorecard. With KPIs, guides appear showing you where to drop the object in order to make it a parent, a child or a sibling. KPIs can be children of other KPIs or of Objectives or they can sit by themselves – it’s up to you.

You can also add dimensions to the scorecard (presuming they exist in your cube of course)!

7. Define how KPIs Rollup

Once our scorecard has been created, we need to decide how our KPIs aggregate. There are 3 types of rollup:

• Average weighted rollup
  Displays an indicator that reflects a calculated score, combined with the weighting that is assigned to each child.
• Indicator count Rollup
  Displays a count of the indicator images that are used in individual KPIs;, or child KPIs of each objective KPI eg
• Worst child rollup
  Displays an indicator that reflects the child KPI that has the worst score.

8. Create a Report

Dashboards are more than just scorecards. We can also add reports of varying types.

In most examples the report will need to already exist somewhere eg on our SSRS portal or in an Excel Services document library in SharePoint however Analytic Chart and Analytic Graph can be created wholly within PerformancePoint. A simple drag & drop interface is used to build these on-the-fly reports.

Note:  I will be discussing reports in much greater detail in the next article in the series.

9. Create a dashboard

We have reports, we have a scorecard so now we can build a dashboard. PerformancePoint gives us a few default layouts to start with.

Most often, I find the Header, 2 Columns is the one I go for so I can stick my Page filters in the top row, a scorecard on the left and a report on the right. Once the empty dashboard is created, the browser pane on the left will show you a list of objects that can be dragged & dropped onto the drop zones.

Drag the scorecard to the left column, the analytic report to the right zone and oh, now we need some Page Filters.

Time is the most obvious one, so start there. Time Intelligence will respect and understand your “CurrentPeriod” selections made earlier. You can add more filters (from other dimensions) using Member Selection or MDX query etc. These Filters will now appear in the object browser pane for you to drop onto the dashboard. In the example given, they’d go into the Header zone.

Of course it doesn’t end there, somehow the Page Filters have to be linked to the scorecard and the report in the other zones. Simply drag the filter onto the “Drop Fields to Create Links” drop zone within each object that you want to link.

Each object has an “endpoint”. A popup will appear that allows you to define how the filter and the object should be mapped to each other. It could be from a unique member or it could be a formula – this would be mapped to the endpoint for the object you dragged it to.

10. Publish the Dashboard

Yep that’s actually it. Dashboard done. From here it gets published to a SharePoint document library. You will be prompted to enter the SharePoint URL and select the appropriate library. What does that mean? Well, you need the library to exist, you need write access to it and your SharePoint installation needs the PerformancePoint web parts installed.

That dear friends, is the whole shebang!

	Part 1 – Getting to Know You – Intro to SharePoint BI
	Part 2 – Sell! Sell! Sell! Why Build a Dashboard Anyway?
	Part 3 – KPIs – Where do I Come From?
	Part 4 – Dissecting Dashboards
	Part 5 – We Really Need to Talk – Scorecards & Reports
	Part 6 – Beware the Bogeyman – Securing Dashboards

Siyonara amigos! Till next time.

Kristen Hodges, MCTS, MCITP
http://www.bi-tch.blogspot.com

http://b-iq.org

References

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/performancepoint/HA102711891033.aspx

Or would it? It may be that we allow for 10% leeway before we say that our variance was bad. So in our example, we would actually have a green light, or maybe orange. We would only get a red light if our variance was greater than -$10,000. Let’s face it; we’re still making money, just not as much as we had hoped.

Did you notice that I didn’t say “Revenue” was the KPI? In fact, I said that the performance of Actual Revenue to a target is the KPI i.e. the variance. This is important. KPIs measure PER-FOR-MANCE.

So, a KPI measures how well we performed against a given target.

That makes sense right? So what’s the fuss about scorecards and KPIs and all that? Well… balanced scorecards are designed to show overall performance of the organisation. Not just easily quantifiable things like Profit Margin. And how do you compare, equate and aggregate information such as Employee Satisfaction, Customer Satisfaction, Operational Effectiveness, Environmental Sustainability and Profit Margin altogether?

 

Where do I Come From?
	Now we get down to the meat of it. And what this has to do with SharePoint. Someone, somewhere has to actually physically build our KPIs, store them, access them and use them.  What are My Options? PerformancePoint Monitoring & Analysing PerformancePoint delivers excellent reusability and sharing of KPIs, customisable indictors. Coming from the Office suite of tools, it is a UI* which doesn’t require IT involvement – it is aimed at BAs and super-users. Integrates with existing technologies, SQL and SharePoint. SharePoint PerformancePoint still uses SharePoint as it’s UI but here I’m talking about building KPIs themselves. As of Office 14, PerformancePoint M&A will be entirely bundled into MOSS. Which I guess means that SharePoint’s existing rudimentary KPI building functionality will disappear. Yes, it’s rudimentary and simple – it’s ok for really small stuff but if you’re from an IT department, my advice is, don’t waste your time. SSAS Get your MDX skills going because you’re gonna be writing a lot of MDX queries. That’s not a bad thing. I’m just saying that’s what you will be doing. Also, all information relating to a single KPI must be contained within that cube where the KPI sits. And you’re gonna have to create the interface using Excel or suchlike yourself. Numerous Other Software Vendors It all comes down to cost doesn’t it? And integration. And user familiarity with the UI*. I know I’m biased. I like PerformancePoint. It integrates nicely with technologies that I’m already using (SQL and SharePoint). And I like that it’s gonna be bundled with MOSS. So sue me (no, don’t really)… * user interface
Who Am I?
	Profit – What Else is There?   I could give you a massive list of KPIs, but I ain’t gonna. Check out the EPM Review. They have an EXHAUSTIVE list of common KPIs. It’ll knock your socks off… or provide just the impetus you’ve been needing to clean out your garage. Who am I to judge? Just remember this… you want to measure performance in all areas that are important to you. While there is some commonality across organisations, there is by no means uniformity. This means, the very first thing you’ve got to do, is consider your organisations values, mission and strategic plan. This will guide you on what’s important FOR YOUR ORGANISATION. Once you know what you want to achieve, then you need to identify what data you already have that can be used to quantify those areas. Then consider, what data you could capture but don’t already have. Finally, don’t forget to think through and identify what data you can’t capture. It may be just as important to know what’s missing. How Long is a Piece of String Defining targets is not as simple as it seems initially. Again, this is something you need to think through at the outset. Targets could be manually entered values, but based on what? It could be as simple as Revenue Last Year + 4%. But someone somewhere has to decide how many percent, and whether that base revenue number should include Revenue from discontinuing entities, or interest or a number of other factors. The fact is, you need to think this through separately for each and every KPI.
Getting on the Merry-Go-Round
	Common issues you will face when designing your KPIs…  Defining the KPI What’s the formula? Each segment of the organisation defines things in slightly different ways. In order to measure them effectively, a corporate view needs to be taken. This can be tricky. If you want the data used to derive the results to be meaningful then you either have to (a) ensure it’s 100% automated and requires no business unit level input or (b) find a way to get everyone to agree on a common definition. Good luck with that! Weighting the KPI Some KPIs are more important than others. Well, maybe not more important but certainly the impact on the organisation of poor performance, or conversely good performance, is more greatly felt. So we need to identify what matters. Again, getting everyone to agree can be challenging. But this is an important thought process and should be well considered before jumping in the deep end. It helps to look at your strategic plan and that may point you in an appropriate direction. Too Many KPIs I see this time and time again. How do you hit the bullseye when you’re aiming everywhere? It’s got to be achievable, not the KPI targets but the project itself. Getting a scorecard up and running is challenge, no doubt about it. But getting people to use it, now that’s the real challenge. So start small. I’ll say it again. Start SMALL. Did you miss it? START SMALL!! Get users comfortable with a few key areas before you throw a thousand or a hundred or even 50 KPIs at them. They just won’t read it. They won’t understand what they are looking at. My suggestion, seriously, start with 10 at the most. I know there are BAs and scorecard developers out there looking at me in stunned silence (well, reading at me in stunned silence… or perhaps not, perhaps you are yelling at the screen (if so, ask yourself why because I can’t actually hear you). Of course, you can revisit it later… just don’t start with information overload. That’s all I’m saying.
	Part 1 – Getting to Know You – Intro to SharePoint BI
	Part 2 – Sell! Sell! Sell! Why Build a Dashboard Anyway?
	Part 3 – KPIs – Where do I Come From?
	Part 4 – Dissecting Dashboards
	Part 5 – We Really Need to Talk – Scorecards & Reports
	Part 6 – Beware the Bogeyman – Securing Dashboards

Siyonara amigos! Till next time.

Kristen Hodges, MCTS, MCITP
http://www.bi-tch.blogspot.com

http://b-iq.org

References

http://www.epmreview.com/KPI-Library.html
http://nickbarclay.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2008-01-09T15%3A44%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=20

Generally, when you start talking about scorecards, people picture the balanced scorecard. The balanced scorecard has 4 perspectives (or objectives), according to the Kaplan methodology which seems to be generally recognised as the most common balanced scorecard. These are: Financial, Operational, People and Customer. The KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) which make up each perspective are specific to your organisation and might be based on your organisation’s 5-year strategy plan or a core set of performance measures or a combination of both. For example:

However this is not the only type of scorecard. How about a sustainability scorecard which shows these perspectives:

Or these:

Now let’s look at an entirely strategy-based approach to a balanced scorecard:

How about a scorecard for use by call centre staff:

As you can see there is no limit to the ways you can use a scorecard except your imagination. But that’s all very well and good, how do you the humble technician explain it to the decision makers? There really are two audiences – those making the IT strategic decisions and business managers, which in my experience means Marketing Managers and Finance Managers. Somehow you need both parties to come to the party at the same time. Which can be a challenge… but that’s a problem you’ll have to nut out for your own organisation. How to manage them? That I can help with!

Ok so first, let’s address the business managers.

Now let’s address the second part of the equation, those holding the IT purse-strings. There are a few wins from their perspective (dodgy scorecard pun intended) too:

• Leverage existing investments in SharePoint and SQL
• Dashboards tend to create warm-fuzzy feelings in high-level managers because they look pretty
• Reduce printing of flat reports
• Reduce storage of large spreadsheets and Access databases
• Reduce emailing spreadsheets around the organisation
• One version of the truth!

But you know what else, if you can get the business managers on board first, the 2^nd part will be a lot easier!

The fact is, hysterical pronouncements about the death of balanced scorecards are somewhat exaggerated. In fact, I’d say a complete crock! If I can see at a glance, the performance of my organisation or my area or my whatever! I am a happy chappy. That’s just common sense. As to the rest, well, I pity the fool. As some old dude with a lot of bling once said.

	Part 1 – Getting to Know You – Intro to SharePoint BI
	Part 2 – Sell! Sell! Sell! Why Build a Dashboard Anyway?
	Part 3 – KPIs – Where do I Come From?
	Part 4 – Dissecting Dashboards
	Part 5 – We Really Need to Talk – Scorecards & Reports
	Part 6 – Beware the Bogeyman – Securing Dashboards

Siyonara amigos! Till next time.

Kristen Hodges, MCTS, MCITP
http://www.bi-tch.blogspot.com

http://b-iq.org

References

http://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c081013a.asp
http://www.bscol.com/pdf/Kaplan-Nagel-Mar04DM.pdf

Business Intelligence (or BI as the cool kids are calling it) has been buzz word du jour for quite some time now. Gartner research lists it as the Number 1 technology priority for 2008 for CIO’s the 3rd year running. Clearly someone important cares! As SharePoint professionals, how can we deliver on these priorities? And what does SharePoint have to do with BI anyway?

What Is Business Intelligence?

As they say, let’s start at the very beginning. Business Intelligence (as if I need to explain it to you!) is a generic term used to describe the technology and processes whose primary purpose is to monitor, analyse and plan thereby driving Business Process Improvement, which is, shock horror(!!), according to the same Gartner research, the Number 1 business priority… who’da thunk it!

Microsoft’s Monitor, Analyze, Plan paradigm is mentioned alot when we talk about BI. It is these three actions which should be driving technology needs and the output of them that should be driving business decisions. That makes it kinda important. It’s all very well to give the Finance Director a report showing how many sales were made this month but unless you start comparing them to last month or last year AND forecasting next year meaningfully then what’s the point? It’s all about informed decision-making and planning.

What’s SharePoint Got to do With it?

When it comes to SharePoint there is, quite rightfully, a lot of focus on portals, collaboration and Content Management. And yet SharePoint is actually plays a big part in the BI space.

With SharePoint we can extend Excel 2007 by using Excel Services for more scalable, manageable spreadsheets. With Report Centre, we can create dashboards from disparate sources, we can talk to Reporting Services, Excel and our LOB systems. With the Business Data Catalog (BDC) we can connect to LOB systems and access data from, for example, SAP and make it available in SharePoint. And that’s before we start considering complementary products such as PerformancePoint.

Performance Who?

So you might notice that I snuck in a little mention of PerformancePoint there. Maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe you haven’t. I’m going to assume the latter because it’s a newish technology. You may have heard of it before under its previous moniker, Business Scorecard Manager or BSM. Still no? Think KPIs, scorecards and dashboards. Now add planning & forecasting. Oh, and don’t forget ProClarity for slice & dice analysis, data mining and yet more KPIs. It’s a bit of a behemoth sure but the idea is that PerformancePoint is the enterprise-level tool for developing everything required for the BI lifecycle – that is, to monitor, analyse and plan. And guess what PerformancePoint uses as it’s delivery tool? You guessed it, SharePoint! There are specific webparts designed just for delivering PerformancePoint. In fact, for users it’s the only way to interact with the monitoring (ie dashboards, scorecards and KPIs) aspects of PerformancePoint. So now we know what PerformancePoint is, why am I banging on about it so much?

What Am I Talking About?

This is the first of a series of 6 articles which is going to focus on SharePoint BI. In particular, building dashboards for SharePoint. And while there are many ways of building dashboards, as I will cover in detail in the part 3, PerformancePoint is a key technology in this armoury with the greatest scope for enterprise-level development. No one method is ‘better’ than the other, they are all Microsoft technologies after all, but each does serve a slightly different purpose. Consider the difference between using Excel, Access and SQL Server to create a database. Sure they’re all do-able but you aren’t gonna create an enterprise application using Excel as a back-end now are you? The same holds true with PerformancePoint and SharePoint. That old saying “the right tool for the right job” is just as relevant in technology as in anything else.

Dashboard, KPIs, Scorecards. Whatever!

BI does have its own set of jargon, doesn’t it! So what does it all mean? Think of it this way… dashboards contain scorecards, reports and any other objects you can think of (applications, links, files etc). Scorecards contain KPIs.

KPIs are “Key Performance Indicators” or measures of how well (or poorly) targets were met.
When talking about KPIs, you can always assume that we have at least an Actual Value and a Target Value. We may also have forecast values.

Scorecards are made up of many KPIs. These KPIs may be grouped. And different weightings applied based on the impact or importance of a KPI. KPI groups and KPIs may be rolled up to show overall performance. Scorecards often include indicators or little graphical flags which show how close to target our KPIs are.

Dashboards are a single page contained in a Document Library. A dashboard may contain multiple scorecards, as well as related reports and other files.

What Are We Going to Cover?

As I mentioned previously, in part 3 we’re going to discuss the various tools available to us in building KPIs, the benefits and risks of each. In part 4, we will learn how to build a dashboard and in part 5, how to get scorecards to communicate with reports and other scorecards for that matter. Finally, dashboard in hand, we will learn how to make sure nobody’s sticky-beaking where they shouldn’t be in part 6. But to get things moving, our next article will answer the question at the heart of it all… why build a dashboard anyway?

I look forward to the next 5 articles, your comments, thoughts and questions.

Cheers,

Kristen Hodges, MCTS, MCITP
http://www.bi-tch.blogspot.com
http://b-iq.org

References

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=587309
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/FX101758691033.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/capabilities/bi/overview.mspx