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