THE BI Blog

Not sure if you've checked out OfficeLabs, a site dedicated to promoting ideas within Microsoft and allowing you to determine whether it is useful or not (they collect usage data on the prototypes).  This week a new prototype went up called ChartAdvisor, which I think you will find very useful. Ever wondered which chart would display your data the best?  ChartAdvisor can help.  Want to see the probabilty of your data being understood as a Radar or Bubble chart? ChatAdvisor can help. 

I've seen some bad charts in my day.  I bet you have too.  My favorites are when people cram 30 items into a pie chart when data is pretty average which gives you 30 equal pie slices. Can you tell the difference or know what you should be looking at?  How about when someone uses a stock or radar chart when a simple bar chart would have worked (you know the reasons why they do it "because it looks cool") and conveyed the message much easier.  Stephen Few has some great examples on his site that identify the many ways you can convey data poorly.

So I invite you to check out ChartAdvisor.  It does have its limitations and prerequisites, (still a prototype) so check to make sure it will work with your scenario in mind.  Try it out and let me know what you think… better yet, let the OfficeLabs’ team know.  More great ideas to come, I am sure.

Great news for Microsoft BI fans everywhere, as we're excited to announce the launch and availability of SQL Server 2008 today.  If you're interested in learning more about the new product, to download a trial, to find a partner, or plan on attending the upcoming PASS event, the largest gathering of SQL Server users anywhere, click over to the SQL Server website to learn more, and be sure to click over to the SQL BI information as well to see the amazing new features for the millions of SQL BI users around the world.  Really impressive stuff from the developers here, and well worth the wait!

SQL Server 2008 is focused on three main themes--trust, productivity, and intelligence.  There are so many great new features in the product for BI, they're too long to list, but they can roughly be distilled across a few main themes: unlocking your data using the data warehousing capabilities of SQL Server 2008--across any data source and for all your data; delivering the right information to the right people in the right format--in time to make the right decision--all through powerful new wizards and new design tools that help you build integration, reporting, and analysis solutions all within the same environment; and driving actionable insight--delivering a rich, personalized user experience which enables more users in your organization to drive action from the insight they gain.

All with the familiar Microsoft Office 2007 style ribbon, familiar Microsoft user interface, and interoperability you expect and need from your Microsoft BI system.

There's lots of information on Robert Bruckner's SQL Server Reporting Services blog on details of the product and its key features, downloads are available via MSDN, and TechNet, and if you'd like to see the SQL Server 2008 BI datasheet, just click here and you can download your own copy.

Congratulations to everyone on the team for an outstanding new product that really cements our leadership position in the marketplace!

I'm sure most of you have seen the news by now, but Microsoft announced last week at the financial analyst conference that it has acquired the assets of privately-held data warehousing company DATAllegro, based in Alisa Biejo, CA, in Orange County.  This is a big day for Microsoft BI, for our continued penetration and growth into the enterprise space, and for our BI strategy and growth in handling large data warehouse workloads. 

DATAllegro has built a scale-out data warehouse solution that has joined together scale and high performance to 100's of terabytes.  While they deliver an appliance (hardware and software together), the hardware is all off-the-shelf industry standard components.  As you can see by visiting the DATAllegro website, they get rave reviews from their enterprise customers, where deployments range from 20 TB all the way to 200+ TB's--now THAT'S a warehouse!  Couple that with their query return speed, and you've got a heck of a productivity tool that makes analysts, DBA's and BI report builders very happy campers.

If you'd like to see the Microsoft PressPass information on the aquisition, please click here.  After the transaction has closed we'll be back with more news and information on how this exciting technology will continue to enhance our BI portfolio!

Well everyone, we're finally live and accepting reservations for the 2nd annual Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference in Seattle on October 6th!

With over 60 break-out sessions, partner pavillions, hands-on-labs, chalk talks, demonstration, customer meetings and great fun in the city of Seattle, you know it's going to be a great time.

We anticipate this being the largest BI conference anywhere--so now's your chance to be a part of it.  Click HERE to be taken to the conference registration site, as well as to check out the agenda, logistics, pricing, everything you need to know!

Looking forward to seeing all of you in Seattle in a few months!

While not exactly BI related, I thought I'd pass along a great piece of marketing focused on gaining customer adoption of Windows Vista.  As everyone knows, Microsoft has had its share of, ahem, "issues" in customer perceptions of Vista, its reliability, compatibility, and functionalty (among many other "alities" that I could mention).

So in the best tradition of the old-school Folger's Coffee challenge (which interviewed unsuspecting customers and "substituted" Folger's Crystals for their regular coffee), we pass along "The Mojave Experiment" at:

www.mojaveexperiment.com

Sometimes the perception doesn't match the reality in technology, see for yourself!

We've just concluded the formal conference season - with the completion of Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston and Microsoft's internal MGX Sales Conference in Atlanta.

Having just completed a phenomenal fiscal year we typically spend the first two weeks of July setting plans and objectives for the coming year.

This kicked off with some 12,500 partners in Houston two weeks ago. From a BI perspective there's some incredible excitement within our partner community and also within the Microsoft business to deliver another stellar year. Most of the major keynotes from Steve Ballmer, Simon Witts and Chris Caposella outlined the importance of Business Intelligence for Microsoft in the upcoming 12 months - all three talked about the "democratization of BI" - which outlines our strategy around providing business intelligence to the majority of decision makers up and down the organization.

You can review the keynote information and major messaging here at the digital WPC site. I'd especially encourage you to look at Chris Caposella's keynote and in particular the demonstration from Kirk Koenigsbauer which showcased not only our core business intelligence assets in PerformancePoint and SQL but also provided some guidance as to how we also leverage the Microsoft SharePoint Server platform and FAST to deliver a truly compelling business intelligence and decision support experience.

Hi everyone,

A great 2nd week for Tech Ed in Orlando last week where we focused on the IT Pro Audience.  Again, fantastic traffic throught the BI hands-on labs, break-outs, and demo stations, as thousands of customers got their hands on PerformancePoint Server, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, and all the Microsoft BI products. 

Based on the attendee account at all of the structured sessions over the course of both weeks (but not counting the endless booth traffic), over 5,200 attendees in our sessions, a huge increase from last year--and given that BI is such a huge focus for the company, it's not a bit surprising.  Here are some of the comments from the attendes that really show the great job by the MSFT team on-site:

Here are some examples of direct comments from customers who attended BI sessions:

“Carolyn Chau was an excellent presenter. I consider myself pretty cynical by nature and when she said that the demos would be 'fun' I was rolling my eyes. Ms. Chau had an infectious enthusiasm for the material however. Her cheery attitude and the excitement she had when going through the demonstrations should be a model for other presenters. It was hard not to be drawn into the presentation with the level of energy she was putting out. I expected a painful 75 minutes but I was pleasantly surprised. Grats to Ms. Chau.”

“For me - this was likely the best "practical" session that I took away from TechEd. The ability to present operational scorecard / KPI / Metrics published via a SharePoint site to showcase my IT operational data is invaluable. The presenters mentioned the steps that they went through to build the dashboards/KPI/etc -- and stated that they may release the detail and steps they did to build the demo in a TechNet article perhaps later on. Please, please, please ... make this available to the community. The type of dashboarding and metric delivery is absolutely essential and something everyone needs to know how to do within their IT Operations environment.”

“This was the best session I attended so far in the conference. The preparation was excellent!!!”

“Great information on deploying Integration Services Packages. Anyone working with SSIS should attend this session.”

“This is a great session. It's not a presentation of where a speaker sits up on stage and repeats their PowerPoint presentation. This is a fun interactive session that shows most of the new features in the BI tool stack while having a blast doing it...”

“You need to have this session all the time. It would be awesome if the other groups would do the same type of thing A++”

“Carolyn did a good job of explaining the new features of the tool and presented valuable information.”

“Excellent speaker - very clear explanations of difficult points. Will really help me with my cubes.”

“Nice overview of the new features of Analysis Services, Reporting Services, SharePoint Integration tools and products. There are so many features here it is almost impossible to cover most of them into any depth and detail. But the speakers did a great job in keeping us interested in what's going on.”

“Presenter did an excellent job of presenting the content.”

Thanks again to Kathy Sabourin and the entire Microsoft BI team for their hard work and success in the last 2 weeks.  It was a fantastic experience to meet with so many of our partners and customers, and really see firsthand the excitement that everyone has for the Microsoft business intelligence solutions.

Do you have performance management? If you don’t you are likely talking to some software company about it. What is up with all of this talk about dashboards, scorecards, planning and budgeting tools, data visualization, closed-loop performance management and what can it actually accomplish for your organization? What value are other organizations seeing from their investments in performance management technology, if any? A recent research report from BusinessWeek uncovers the mystery behind what organizations are actually realizing from these business driving solutions, some of the highlights include:

·         Two thirds of the senior executive whose companies use performance management say it has a positive effect on shareholder value

·         Organizations exercising world-class performance management practices enjoy a 2.4 times market returns of typical companies in their industry

·         The broader the distribution of BI and performance management tools, the higher the potential return on the investment

·         The biggest return on investment can come from extending performance management to front-line workers, like telemarketers and collections staff

So if you haven’t already, give your dashboard a hug, it certainly deserves it.

Accenture has been diligently working on some research (since 2004) on the characteristics of top performing finance organizations, labeled the “The Changing Role of the Finance Organization in a Multi-Polar World.” I like the BusinessFinance title of “The Secrets of Finance Ninjas” better. The BusinessFinance article shows some of the research displaying characteristics of the finance masters and how they match up to what the non-masters are doing in the following categories:

·         High performers are focused on strategic business issues rather than operational details

·         They invest in advanced capabilities

·         They adopt leading finance workforce practices

·         They focus on value creation

It’s interesting to see where performance management, ERP, and things like risk management rank in these categories. BI vendors have been talking about many of these areas for a long time now, but it’s nice to be validated with some credible research. And so, the question I ask to you, are you a finance ninja?

In case you weren't aware of this...last week we released the Service Pack for PerformancePoint Server 2007.

With this new Service Pack, enhancements have been made to the monitoring, analyzing and planning functionality found in PerformancePoint Server to  help organizations improve decision making. Usability, stability and performance enhancements are key focus areas for PerformancePoint Server SP1. 

Organizations will be able to take advantage of new workbook options for improved performance of queries, as well as see the effects of changes in planning assignments for better “what-if” analysis.

Organizations using strategy maps and KPI’s for monitoring and analytics will see improvements to scorecard and filter usability.  Scorecards with negative numbers have improved formatting and are easier to read, while dashboards with filters are now faster to render and provide the ability to link reports directly to KPI’s. There are also improvements to Tabular filters and Time Intelligence Post Formula filters.

In addition, SP1 adds certified support for Windows Server 2008.  Support for SQL Server 2008 will be available later this year following the release of SQL Server 2008.

For more details:

http://office.microsoft.com/enus/performancepoint/FX102380591033.aspx

Our apologies for the light posting lately—we’ve been in heads-down planning mode, getting ready for our biggest BI year ever in the company.

We’ve officially now entered “Event Season” here at Microsoft, where we hold some of our biggest company events of the year—Tech Ready, this year 2 fun-filled weeks in Orlando for IT Pro’s and Developers; our Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston early next month, MGX, the Microsoft company-wide sales kick-off in Atlanta next month, all culminating with the big BI Sales Summit, our BI sales kick-off to round out the month of July.

And with June being year-end, you can imagine how we’ve all been pretty heads-down in getting ready for a big few months.

But with your needs, and our blog, in mind, we’d be remiss without giving you an update from the first week of Tech Ed with our developer customers and letting you know how it’s going.

First, a link to the Tech Ed website for those of you not as familiar with the event to get up to speed.

And now, some insight into the first week from our own John Hormachea, reporting from the floor of the Orange County Convention Center in beautiful Orlando, Florida!

“…TechEd is broken down into two tracks this year: Developer and IT Pro. I’m here for the Developer week. A lot of smart developers are here and a lot of great sessions around Business Intelligence are being offered. One thing I am surprised about is the number of people that are still not familiar with the Business Intelligence offerings from Microsoft. Often times we at Microsoft assume that everyone has heard about our message. But we shouldn’t take that for granted. There are a lot of people that are hungry for Business Intelligence products, and are wanting to learn about Microsoft’s offerings. Microsoft needs to be vigilant and make sure that we truly do evangelize to the masses on the value of Microsoft Business Intelligence…”

Thanks John!  He hits on a great point—as fast as we’re growing here at MSFT around our BI practice, it’s important to remember that there are still a lot of people that don’t know how big of a business or priority this is for the company.  Or maybe John was just telling us that we need to be blogging more….

More to come from Orlando!

The PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning Data Migration Tool is now available on TechNet and the MS Download Center.

Norm Warren has provided some great additional guidance to support this here.

Documentation: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc512833.aspx

Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FA1C6CAD-45BD-4E5C-A257-4BBA84FA4224&displaylang=en

Well, how do you?  Success means a number of different things.  In life, in relationships, at work... and is it personal success, team success or corporate?  Who defines this and more importantly, how do we know we are successful when it happens?  Is it that deal we just won, that new drug that just got passed, or is it employee health and retention, service-level agreements or all of these things? 

If we think about the business, just how is success defined?  I think if you ask your employees what success means you might be surprised at the various definitions that they respond with.  Are they aware of the corporate goals that management is concerned about and equally important; do they know how they impact these goals?  From a management perspective, how do you align everyone around these definitions of success so you're moving the ball forward?

This is where scorecards come in and how they can play an important role in helping you define success, provide transparency and accountability.  At the very heart of a scorecard is the definition of what you are measuring, providing everyone with a common language and removing any ambiguity.  You are thereby clearly stating that this scorecards represents the things that are important to the health of the business. 

Second, it provides everyone in your organization with a clear set of goals and status on how the company is performing on these areas.  Talk about alignment!  If I know that the company is investing in area X and that this is a key focus for the company, I can modify my activities to help make improvements in this area and if I require more information, know who to contact to gain additional insight. You'll also find that your employees will begin to create their own departmental/team scorecards, but will have some unique items that are important to that group/person.  This won't happen overnight but as the culture of your organization changes to understand what success means, how it is measured and where the accountability lies, the alignment will begin to happen and cascade downward through the ranks.

This leads me to another value of scorecards, accountability.  Having someone's name associated with a metric is very important and compelling.  Let's take the example that you own a metric pipeline generation, and I own the metric new sales.  My metric is yellow with the trend indicator of red with a down arrow (in this example, green is healthy, red not so much).  This tells me that my area of responsibility is trending downward and not looking good.  After further analysis, I notice that my metric and your metric are linked, and that I have a dependency on your success (cause and effect).  Your metric is also red and trending downward and has been for quite some time.  One of several things could happen - one of which is I could contact you, and understand how I can help you be successful, knowing that you impact my metric and ultimately my success.  Neither of us want to go into the next business review meeting and have our metrics shown as red and asked what we are going to be doing about them.  Rather, we can be proactive and correct any problems or issues now, allocating resources as needed and modify our plan (system of record) to reflect these changes. 

The key to scorecards is not that you measure everything, but measure what's important to the health of your business.  There are many books written on this subject and methodologies on how specific industries should implement scorecards.  Choose the method that's right for you and even mix methodologies if that makes sense, or go completely custom and create your own.  Too many times I've seen scorecards with items on it that have very little impact to the business but it is on the scorecard because it was easily measured.  This gives you some additional insight that the metrics important to your business are not being recorded anywhere.  And keep your scorecards light.  A scorecard with hundreds of items on it is not easily tracked and confusing.  

Remember the purpose of your scorecards - define success, create alignment, and enable accountability.