All organizations, public, private, large and small need to effectively manage business performance. This has never been truer than in today’s complex, highly regulated and confusing business environment which requires better decisions and improved execution now!

In spite of the billions of dollars invested in information technology to address these challenges, managers and executives in many organizations still make key decisions underpinned by their own personal versions of documents and spreadsheets. Their organization struggles to provide a seamless flow of trusted information between customers, suppliers and their employees.

The result is that most organizations cannot provide their people with the right information at the right time, and in attempting to do so are committing significant resources to compiling and auditing numbers instead of using them to inform the business. Consequently, they are far more reactive than proactive and ultimately they are not efficiently and effectively managing their current and future performance.

Leading organizations are investing in managing information and developing predictive insights to drive sustainable business results. These companies have become masters in Performance Management - going beyond mere users of business intelligence to become the “Intelligent Enterprises.”

How Does Business Intelligence Work 

Business intelligence (BI) delivers on a simple promise: improved business performance by delivering better decision making throughout your entire organization. When you know that your insight into corporate data is sound, informed, and complete, you can trust every decision you make. With that level of confidence securely in hand, you can improve business performance, create competitive advantage, and achieve corporate objectives.

Microsoft BI helps deliver trusted and confident decision making through three key steps:

Step 1:  Quality Data

Give your users a way of finding the data they need in an easy-to-understand format that helps them make decisions. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 can help you improve your data process. SQL Server 2005 offers an enterprise-ready and proven relational engine that can store huge amounts of data, support high query loads, high performance, and clustering, and scale to the largest enterprise needs.

SQL Server 2005 provides organizations with three core BI components:  

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services brings your data together from all your disparate sources. This powerful ETL tool can help you synthesize new data, enrich it in a high-performance way, and reload it back into SQL Server 2005. Integration Services is built to work in heterogeneous environments and with virtually any data source within your organization.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services adds additional value to your data by placing complex calculations and key performance indicators (KPIs) into the system. Enrich your organization with centralized and shared business logic. Analysis Services also reorganizes data in a hierarchical way that makes sense to decision makers and supports their reporting and analysis needs.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services helps your end users retrieve and publish data. Reporting Services helps make data easily accessible to a large number of users.

Step 2:  Tools to gain deeper insights

Provide your end users with the resources that help them make accurate and confident decisions. One of the tools that many people already use, understand, and trust is Microsoft Office Excel. With the 2007 release, Microsoft has made a huge investment in your ability to analyze, visualize, and gain insight into data.

Some of the new improvements include:
 
Microsoft Office Excel 2007 has been significantly improved. The analysis environment you are familiar with now provides you with access to more information, easier and more robust analysis, and a simple connection to the data in SQL Server 2005 in a more secure, intuitive, and managed way.

Excel Services offers a new component that enables the publication of analyses and insights gained in Excel. With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, users can publish to the Web, your extranet, or intranet. This level of integration and trusted pathways helps maintain the integrity of your data source and ensures that the data is consistent.

Step 3:  Decisions aligned with corporate goals

The first two steps help individual employees make individual decisions. This next step helps improve corporate-level decision making all across your organization. Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 makes this possible by providing informational views that consolidate all your corporate data—from sales to HR and operations to finance. Decision making now has a greater context that captures the workings of your entire company.

The Result

Individuals have access to better quality data. They can make better decisions and can trust that their decisions are aligned with corporate goals. Microsoft BI supports business environments from small to enterprise. It grows as you grow, and it’s a small investment for a large return on trust that can help you build your business.