THE BI Blog

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.

A wealth of new content (templates, project plans and worksheets) has been made available on TechNet to assist partners and customers with implementing PerformancePoint Server 2007.

There are links to this content below:

• Project Plan Framework (.pptx)

• Dimension Mapping for Input Forms/Output Reports (.xls)

• PerformancePoint Server Configuration (template) (.xlsx)

• Monitoring and Analytics Project Plan (template) (.mpp)

• Operations and Maintenance Guide (template) (.docx)

• Planning Design Configuration (template) (.docx) [Forthcoming]

• Planning Project (template) (.mpp)

• PerformancePoint Server Specifications (template) (.docx)

• Preliminary Requirements Gathering and Scoping Questionnaire (.docx)

• Source Dimension Fact Data Mapping (.xlsx)

• Test Plan (template) (.docx)

• Training Plan (template) (.docx)

As always we'd welcome your feedback on these.

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.