THE BI Blog

I had the opportunity to present with our partner KPMG at last week’s Microsoft Executive Series Leadership Conclave (say THAT 10 times fast) in Dubai on our business intelligence and performance management solutions, and how organizations can adopt BI technology to help drive improved performance.

Although being held in Dubai, the event was actually put on by our Indian Subsidiary for their top customers.  The attendees, comprised of CIO’s, CEO’s, CFO’s, and other key executives, were treated to an outstanding agenda of thought provoking and incredibly informative sessions from industry luminaries from India, in addition to Microsoft employees and our partners.

BI and performance management is high on the agenda of senior executives in India, if this group is any indication.  Like many other markets, the term “BI” is often part of a broader initiative ongoing in the organization, whether it’s to drive higher margins, increase productivity, or determine the most profitable customers.  Whatever the project name, they’re all driven by the need to enable more intelligent decisions.  This is especially critical given some of the limitations that companies in India face—huge growth and opportunity, high turnover amongst employees (with so many available jobs), and an infrastructure that is straining at the seams. 

Given these challenges, there’s a high premium given to solutions that provide a quick return on investment, are easy to learn, and that tie in with the key back-end systems that are in use today.  And that’s where the Microsoft BI focus is as well.  With the familiarity of the Office environment, our partners and sales teams in India are seeing rapid adoption of the BI toolset because they can get their users up on the system with minimal training, and the systems get used by the people to need to make the decisions on the front lines.

But as important as the fact that the customers find the product easy to use is that they require any BI tool they implement to work with the infrastructure investments they’ve already made (and in this fast growing marketplace, these investments can be significant!).  Whether it’s to the ERP system, financials and G/L, data warehouse, or a spreadsheet, the need to trust the data and ensure it’s of high quality, delivered on a timely basis, and in the way that people want to use it is paramount.  Perhaps it’s no surprise that the SQL Server 2008 launch was so well received throughout the country.

All in all a great conference showcasing some fantastic work being done by leading organizations in a vibrant and increasingly confident country.  Through partners like KPMG and Wipro, out in front at the conference speaking about performance management and the investments their making in Microsoft BI, it’s an incredibly exciting time to be helping customers in such a dynamic environment.  Expect a lot more news and successes from India around BI and performance management in the coming months!

This three-part webcast series has been created specifically for Microsoft partners and will provide guidance and best practices around implementing PerformancePoint Server 2007.

The first two webcasts will take partners through the suggested phases of a generic PerformancePoint Server Monitoring and Analysis and Planning implementation; what to look out for - and the "do's" and the "don'ts." In addition, a webcast detailing Microsoft's internal implementation of PerformancePoint Server 2007 is also scheduled. The objective of this series is to train partners how to use the Implementation Methodologies developed by Microsoft's BI CoE in order to successfully and correctly implement PPS at customer sites.  The series will take place the first three Tuesdays in May at 9:30am PT. Registration links below:

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007:  M&A Implementation Methodologies and Best Practices

This webcast will introduce you to Microsoft Consulting Services’ Performance management Center of Excellence (PM-CoE). The PM-CoE is responsible for documenting implementation methodology and best practices for Performance Point Server 2007. The presentation will take you through the suggested phases of a generic PerformancePoint Server M&A implementation; what to look out for – and the “do’s” and “don’ts”.

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007: Planning Implementation Methodologies and Best Practices

This webcast will introduce you to Microsoft Consulting Services’ Performance Management Center of Excellence (PM-CoE). The PM-CoE is responsible for documenting implementation methodology and best practices for Performance Point Server 2007. The presentation will take you through the suggested phases of a generic PPS Planning implementation; what to look out for – and the “do’s “ and”don’ts”.

Microsoft Finance Case Study: PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning Implementation Do’s and Don’ts

Microsoft is on the path of migrating all current planning and forecasting applications with an integrated solution based on Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007. This webcast will address the financial management challenges addressed by PerformancePoint Server 2007 and lessons learned.

An interesting question posed recently by one customer to another at a trade show that I happened to overhear while walking (OK running) to the brownie table during one of the breaks:  "How important is the familiarity of the BI tools to you?"  Now while I didn't stick around for the answer (see "table, brownie" above), it's an issue we are hearing more and more from customers and prospects in the marketplace--"give me tools that my users will actually USE!"

You've all probably seen the Gartner CIO study that list BI as a top spending priority once again for this year--the third year running.  But what's more interesting from a "where's the opportunity to help our customers out" perspective, is the supporting data underneath.  For while there's a huge appetite for BI out there (can't get the damn brownies out of my mind, it's snack time), the delta between who's actually using BI, and who would LIKE to be using BI is still significant.  Even after 3 years--heck, even after 10 years of spending countless billions of dollars, few organizations have actually been able to deliver on the promise of "BI for everyone."  And the Gartner study bears it out.  The number of CIO's who WANT to get BI out to everyone?  Lots.  The number who HAVE gotten it out to everyone?  Few.  So why is that?

We'll get into a number of our ideas and thoughts behind this over time, but one thing we hear consistently has to do with the fact that most BI tools are just plain too hard to use by the average information worker in a company today.  They make you conform to their processes, not to yours.  They make you learn a new UI, new routine, new way of entering data.  After all, there's a reason that training makes huge money for vendors--it takes 2 weeks just to learn the system and its processes!

But increasingly, we're seeing users being brought into the decision making process for BI tools, which is great!  After all, they're the ones that have to use it.  And when asked if they'd like to learn yet another new application, tool, and process, or use something familiar to them, you can guess what they choose.

So as you consider your BI vendors and projects, keep in mind the issue of familiarity in terms of the tools you adopt.  There's something to be said for making use of the tools you already know how to use to solve your most pressing business challenges!

Now, back to brownies...

What do you get when you put Virtual Earth and PerformancePoint Server together? How about a geospatial solution on steroids? Together the two technologies expand what is possible with BI and data visualization and offer a way to monitor performance, locations, and make better, faster and more relevant decisions allowing the business to plan more rapidly, act more quickly, ensure the achievement are aligned with the overall strategy and budget.  Check out this public sector solution scenario example for health and safety.  

At the recent Chicago Gartner BI event, every MDM session was standing room only with various discussions on the value of MDM to the location of the repository.  If you haven’t already heard, Microsoft acquired a leading MDM vendor, Stratature sometime back and has already released a Technology Preview allowing customers and partners begin to use the solution and provide feedback to help shape the direction that we take.  

The core message - MDM is now mainstream and data quality issues are moving upstream into the hands of non-technical people who are becoming increasingly more important in maintaining the master data, and influencing and directing what should be master data.  The past failures of IT-centric approaches are painfully evident and in order for MDM to succeed within organizations, the right body of people need to be assembled.  Similar to the data stewardship role in developing a data warehouse, a team is required to define just what is the master data within an organization, how often it should change, and who has the authority to change.  Of course, the right MDM system will make it easy for all parties to be involved, notify and kick-off the right processes when change occurs, and influence all future applications with the right taxonomy.    With a working MDM system, users will be able to gleam insight from their analytical systems and continually improve their operational systems, shortening the amount of time it takes to gain further understanding. 

How is MDM successful?  MDM must unite people, processes, and systems with context of the business.  The latter is taken for granted but just like any other system, not knowing the context inhibits any ability to understand and influence.  Since MDM will touch many different users, and many different systems, it is important to ensure the master data is structured in such a way that finding and changing information is not a chore but easily delegated to the right individuals.   Of course, the right systems and controls need to be in-place as well as well articulated processes that identify how the master data is to be acted upon.

Problems to implementing MDM?  First off there is the multiple systems that have their own rules and data fragmentation.  IT applications are numerous and required to run the business so an MDM system must be able to interact with and capture the current system of record and then modify it once the master data has been identified.  Mergers and acquisitions introduce additional systems that need to be considered and MDM must be part of the processes of the business.  If it is “yet another system”, it will be treated as such and could be neglected which could introduce latency in the master data.  Critical for success is a closed-loop system between the operational and analytical systems to ensure proper update and consistency.  Other problems include poor middleware applications that hinder the implementation of an MDM system by not moving the data through the entire value chain, or require heavy setup and configuration as well as custom development to accomplish the required tasks.  Last but not least, organizational politics need to be addressed.

Should MDM live in the Data Warehouse?  This is an interesting debate and depends on your core requirements.  What is important is not where the master data resides, but how it is agreed upon and communicated – how is it entered, managed, updated, and what systems it influences.  Like any approach, devising a monolithic-centralized system is time consuming and almost always setup for failure.  Approaching it from a departmental lens, and updating items in small pockets ensures reliability, create a long-lasting process, and allows users to begin using the information right away versus waiting for nirvana.

Call to action – to find out more about Microsoft’s MDM offering, check out the MDM page at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/mdm as well as signup for our Technology preview to begin using the technology and provide us with feedback in how you are implementing MDM in your organizations.  Please send an email to MDMVibe@Microsoft.com with your request and your feedback.  If MDM is foreign to you, there is a lot of research on and insight on Roger Wolter’s and Kirk Haselden’s blog.  And of course, if you are a Gartner client, they have some very good research on this too.

I also look forward to your comments, and thoughts.

This was the first North American BI focused Gartner event where Microsoft was positioned as a leader in the BI quadrant. I focused most of my time on the CPM side of the house attending most of the performance management related sessions, here’s a recap from the events that took place:

General and breakout sessions:

·         CPM is still hot according to Gartner, with strong growth in the market over the past several year, the future looks bright for once upstart now well established category of performance management. Nigel Rainer had a session on CPM where he called out five key focus areas of corporate performance management functionality including; planning and budgeting, dashboards and scorecards, financial consolidation, profitability optimization, and financial management reporting. Rainer also had spoke to hosted solutions in the CPM realm as an area to watch in the next 2-5 years. This holds true particularly in the mid-sized business market where organization have neither the budget nor the IT staff to support user demand around performance management applications.

·         There was lots of interesting commentary around XBRL and hosted solutions as the future of the space, there was a mention of XBRL filing being made mandatory by the SEC. Rainer spoke to XBRL as a new way to revolutionize the way companies provide financial information to the org. Rainer pointed to the SEC’s financial explorer portal which provides financial details of several dozen publicly traded companies using XBRL tagging. http://209.234.225.154/viewer/home/

·         John Van Decker and French Caldwell had an interesting session on GRC and financial governance, the net here was that most of the smaller governance vendors will get sucked up by the already consolidated CPM/ERP vendors and added to the portfolio. They also spoke to the overall vision of document management and collaboration as a key piece of the future of GRC

Others that attended feel free to post along your comments as well!

Well its being a crazy 2 months here in Microsoft. We launched SQL Server 2008, along with Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 on February 27th. It will be the largest developer and IT professional outreach in Microsoft history. It has been a lot of work across all of Microsoft with over 200 launch events across the globe. This will also be the biggest community reach in Microsoft history with over 2000 community events. The theme for the launch is Heroes Happen Here. We focused the launch on our users - developers and IT Professionals - by showing how the work they do on a daily basis makes an impact on their organizations. We are proud to make products that enable them to be more successful. Here is a post of the actual launch day that we did in LA -

SQL Server 2008 Launch - 8:00am PST 2/26/2008

SQL Server 2008 Launch - 10:30am 2/27/2008

I have just come back from India where we had 3 launch events across India from Mumbai to Delhi - Go to  India Launch events to see all the cool stuff the India sub did.

As part of the launch - we have several marketing activities - from the virtual launch experience, to comics, books etc. You can find out more at http://www.heroeshappenhere.com

For more information on SQL Server 2008 or download the latest CTP- goto www.microsoft.com/sqlserver

CFO magazine recently did a research study on business innovation to explore how finance works with the business to engage in new and better ways of driving the organization forward. This has been a very hot topic for both the BI industry and the finance world as organizations look to technology to help give finance a strategic seat at the business table. I was recently at a CFO event where the topic of the conference was how IT and Finance is partnering to provide stronger value to the business.  Questions such as; should your company’s finance team devote more, the same or less effort to activities such as finding and validating opportunities to improve operating performance, understanding the revenue, cost, and profit implications of decisions, understanding competitive dynamics, developing business cases for investment decisions, analyzing customer preferences and purchasing behavior, and preparing budgets, plans, and forecasts?

The study also shed light on the topic of collaboration and how companies are using a collaborative process to enable end users to generate better results. For examples, which impact have investments in collaboration had on the following attributes of your organization; quality of business insight and decision making, individual productivity, work group productivity, collaboration among employees and departments, development of innovative ideas, ect.

The research featured in-depth interviews with executives from companies such as 3M Company, Dow Chemical Company, Fidelity National Financial, Hilton Grand Vacations, U.S. Department of Labor and Wal-Mart

 Here is a link to the webcast that walks through the research.

http://www.cfo.com/webcasts/index.cfm/eventarchive/10641064?f=search

Because that’s increasingly the choice that customers are being asked to make, and one, quite frankly, we’re more than happy to have a discussion around.

With the recent consolidation of vendors in the BI marketplace, there are predictably hard choices to be made where you have overlapping ( in some cases 4-5 overlapping) products that all do basically the same thing.  In one such recently publicized case, with the selection of the company's go-forward planning product, it was praised for having an “Excel-like” interface.

This cracks me up.  Here the poor, humble, beaten-down-by-1000-whitepapers spreadsheet is pooh-poohed endlessly by BI vendors.  Meanwhile, somewhere on the list of reasons why one product should be kept over the other one at a corporate level, potentially disrupting hundreds of customers and thousands of users on the old products, there’s likely a whiteboard somewhere that says “Excel Like Interace—PLUS!!!”

Increasingly, we’re finding that rather than having just “some” of the functionality of Excel, or Excel “Like” interfaces, finance professionals, and indeed, people who work in data in any part of the organization, want to use Excel to do the job—not an add-in or plug-in or “Like” interface; and not in a vacuum, but as an integrated component of the BI environment.  The real thing.

With the new collaboration and sharing capabilities that easily turn the personal spreadsheet into a shared document, or the front end of an enterprise-wide budget, IT Directors who used to be unsure if they wanted people working in the Excel environment are finding reason after reason to push out their end user BI functionality to the rich Excel environment.  And today, with the ability of IT to retain version control, access, and security down to the individual cell level (not to mention a million rows of spreadsheet goodness), this increasingly makes sense to implement.  They get a tool that their users already know how to use; they cut down on the IT backlog and make BI more of a self service solution; and they increase adoption of the BI initiatives and capabilities in their organization--they get people wanting more.

So with apologies to our friends at Hertz, while some vendors will continue to push “Like,” we love that customers are increasingly coming to the conclusion that there's Excel, and then there's "Not Exactly."

There’s been lots of talk in the last week or so as the fall-out of the BI consolidation becomes more apparent.  Making decisions on what products to continue developing, which products to end-of-life, and which products you want to punt on and defer to the future is one of the most critical aspects to ensuring an acquisition is successful, and many vendors in the BI space are going through that decision process right now.

If you’ve been reading the CIO Magazine and Infoworld articles on vendors recent decisions in this area, you’ll know that thousands of customers are getting ready to enter into the massive gray area of a disruptive product roadmap.  Their product has been discontinued, and while they’ll be on support for a few more years, ultimately they’re going to have to change their underlying IT structure and processes to accommodate a new product user interface, new training, new upgrade paths, new integration—heck, new EVERYTHING.

So what we’re hearing more and more of from our customers in terms of their need for an integrated suite of applications in place “today” resonates in light of some of the other news across the industry.  At the end of the day, to accomplish the goals of business intelligence within Microsoft, we’re dependent on two product families—SQL Server, and Office.  That’s it!  Often times our customers are surprised that it’s just those two product groups that comprise the entirety of the MSFT BI portfolio—products that in large part they already own and use extensively throughout their organizations today. 

With the capabilities of the Office desktop in Excel and Visio, the collaboration and sharing capabilities of SharePoint Server and Excel Services, and the performance management functionality with PerformancePoint, the Office system of products provides a wide range of capabilities for individuals, teams, and entire organizations to address their most challenging business issues.

Coupled that functionality with the amazing data integration, reporting, and analysis BI capabilities of SQL Server 2005 and soon, 2008, and you’ve got a fully integrated stack of BI products that are resident today in many of our customers’ IT environments.

Pretty great news for organizations that suddenly have to hunt around and begin to assess the workloads of disruptive upgrades in the coming years!

Just back from the Gartner Australian business intelligence summit held last week in sunny Sydney, Australia (I know, but somebody’s gotta do these things) with a few thoughts on the BI market in Australia and Asia-Pac and the conference round-up:

·         Companies are all over the board when it comes to their usage and vision of BI.  I’m sure this is more of a universal theme vs. something confined to the region, but there was a fairly wide disparity between where companies were—some were still just getting reports to their end users, while others wanted mobile BI and analytics for their reps all over the world.  It just goes to show you that the market is still young and growing!

·         Ease of use is a top-line concern.  One of our partners (Nic Barclay of B(iQ) )actually built a dashboard with KPI’s for a prospect right at our booth in a matter of minutes, which had the attendee still shaking his head that it could actually be done as he walked away.  The ability to make BI easy and attainable for our IT Pro’s and technical users is paramount to getting the technology implemented and used today.

·         Watching out for the hidden costs of BI.  Lots of talk, as you would imagine, about how external market issues (i.e. the economy) are influencing IT budgets and strategies, which brings to mind one of the most common, yet hidden costs of a BI implementation, training.  It doesn’t often appear on the initial vendor presentation, but by the time you add everything together, training your employees on your BI tool can often cost more than the software itself!  Many customers I spoke to seemed to have that top of mind these days.

·         Lastly, lots of interest and questions on how to leverage existing Microsoft investments in products like Excel, SharePoint, and SQL Server to become more “BI” centric.  Obviously, this is a great conversation for us to have!  But a focus on leveraging what our customers have already purchased is important to ensure they not only use what they’ve purchased, but that they get the business value from the software.  In some cases, extending investments in products with new ones is the answer—while in other cases, it’s ensuring that the product capabilities are actually “turned on” to promote business intelligence within the organization.

Great week with great partners and customers, and an aggressive rate of growth for our operations down under!

Down here at the Gartner BI Conference this week, I had the chance to meet up with the folks from B(iQ), the first Microsoft Australian Certified Partner on PerformancePoint Server.

Adrian and his gang have gone above and beyond just mere certification, and have taken pen to paper and authored two books on PerformancePoint Server that are must-haves for any customers or partners who are looking to get more information on the technology, how to implement it, and how to ensure that the projects you’re addressing are successful.  Here are the books with links to buying information:

The Rational Guide to Planning with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007

The Rational Guide to Monitoring and Analyzing with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007

With a forward by our own Peter Bull, these are two great reference guides to add to your professional collection.  Kudos to the B(iQ) team on their leadership in this area.  The local Australian business and B(iQ) are working on a number of local events around performance management in the coming months, for our customers in Australia be on the look-out!

Guy

Just back from the CFO Rising Conference in Orlando this week, where Microsoft was a Gold Sponsor of the event.  They had great attendance this year, with over 400 people crowding into the Hilton Walt Disney World to hear a variety of presentations on all matters of CFO issues, from increasing shareholder value, to compliance, to…drum roll please…how to get a more forward looking view of your business!

Which is where we actually come into the picture.  I had the chance to present to a group of the CFO’s about the key issues for finance and business intelligence, or as it’s more commonly known and understood to finance people—performance management.

While not focusing on any one product, like PerformancePoint Server for instance, instead we focused on the key challenges that companies face in getting started on these projects, and how to overcome them using a combination of their people, their business processes, and of course, technology.

It’s amazing to see the nodding heads when you speak of previous projects gone bad when all three factors are not brought into the equation.  And today, CFO’s are being hit more than ever with the need to be more “activist” in nature, and not just count the money, but help make the money as well. 

Performance management projects, and ultimately PerformancePoint Server, are a way for them to get back in control of the situation and help drive their own business performance.  And judging by the follow-up questions and subsequent booth traffic requesting demo’s, they’re ready to start digging into the challenge with Microsoft!

Look for us out there at more and more business and finance focused events!

After an amazing week, the SharePoint 2008 conference has come to a close.  3800+ attendees from all over the world converged on Seattle to hear from experts, network, and explore partner solutions all on top of SharePoint 2007.  For those who are interested in the stats, here is a quick list:

-          3800 attendees registered

-          44 countries represented

-          150+ breakouts ranging from ECM, collaboration, social computing, deployment, scalability, development, implementation, SharePoint Designer, and Business Intelligence.

-          45+ Hands on labs

-          61 Sponsor and exhibit companies

-          Hotels in the surrounding area completely sold out

-          Over 100 XBOX’s for the ultimate Frag fest and Rockband concert

-          Master Chief in attendance!

Thomas Rizzo kicked off the conference with keynotes from Bill Gates and Kurt DelBene and a ton of announcements around SharePoint, with the key release of Search Server Express 2008 and hosted SharePoint via Microsoft Online Services to all companies, no matter their size.  You can find out more about this exciting initiative here.

Every session I attended for Business Intelligence was standing room only.  Microsoft Partners like EMC and Slalom Consulting gave examples of how the SharePoint platform with PerformancePoint is reaching users enabling access to critical information and resources for Performance Management.  Dan Parish, from the Microsoft Excel Services team, presented how you can extend the capabilities of Excel Services to a packed room of over 300 with tremendous feedback.  Not to worry if you missed that sessions as we will be posting the content that was presented in a separate blog to showcase examples of how you can use Excel Services.

I had the privilege of engaging with numerous customers on how they are deploying SharePoint across their organization, from the public sector to private organizations, and how it is making an impact in the way users are collaborating, finding the information they need, and increasing productivity throughout.  And how IT is raising the bar and enabling business users to gain access to the information they need securely and consistently.  One such example was very impressive talking to the VP of a college where he passionately described how his team had embraced SharePoint and in under 3 months, rolled out a game changing experience not only for the faculty and administrative staff, but also for students and how they had access to the information that they could take action on, and thus enhance their overall experience at the college – from finance and payments, to course curriculum and class schedules.  Students could own their education experience and stay on top of the areas that mattered, and professors could view how students were progressing through the term and in various courses.  Business intelligence plays a critical role in displaying the right information, presenting various dashboards for students and staff alike, and creating KPIs to measure performance at multiple levels.  If only I had something like this back in my day instead of that green terminal screen! J

In all, a great conference and huge excitement for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Business Intelligence, from SQL Server to Performance Point.  You can catch the all the news, keynotes and other information from the conference on the website.   See you next year!

Pej.
SharePoint Senior Product Manager, IWPMG