Intelligent Insight on PerformancePoint : Microsoft

Partner Bot

btamblyn — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 21:16:33 GMT

This actually began as an idea from a couple of guys in my team Steve Marsh and Alex Smith have been pulling this together for a couple of months now.

So what is it?

Partner Bot is your Instant Messenger 'data digger', which quickly retrieves partner-related information and shows you where you can find the answers you need. Simply type in your question and Bot will bring back an instant response. Add Bot as a buddy in your Windows Live Messenger contacts and it will always be available whenever you're logged in. Whether you're looking for support options, searching for competitive information or want to learn more about competencies, ask Partner Bot and it will point you in the right direction.

(Please be aware that Bot may guide you to areas of the Partner Portal which can only be accessed by Registered, Certified or Gold Partners, so you may need to sign-in to view this information.)

How Do I Add Partner Bot to My Contacts?

Log-in to Windows Live Messenger
Click on 'Add a Contact' icon
Add partnerbot@hotmail.com into Instant Messaging Address

As a test, try asking the Bot "What is PerformancePoint?" Alternatively ask "Who is Steve Clayton?

This is a great piece of innovation that's come out of the UK partner team and should hopefully assist in navigating the wealth of content on the Microsoft partner web site.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Partner, PerformancePoint Server

The light at the end of the tunnel for Flash developers...

btamblyn — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:11:25 GMT

Great post from my colleague James Senior on the release last week of Silverlight - our answer to Adobe Flash.

Technorati Tags: WPF/E, Silverlight, Web

Business Intelligence 2.0 re-visited

btamblyn — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 16:16:00 GMT

Anyone - who's a regular reader of this blog (I think there's about 3 other than my immediate family) will know that I have a real fascination of the role web 2.0 will have in transforming the business intelligence landscape. Over the past couple of weeks there's been some really interesting announcements.

In late March it was announced that Sharp Analytics had been acquired by digital marketing agency iCrossing. Undoubtedly an interesting and bold move. Tom Huddock interviewed CEO Chuck Sharp which you can find here. What's really interesting about this is that Chuck sees himself as a marketer first and a technologist second, and I kind of like this philosophy. Often we get bogged-down in the technology and often the business benefits were looking to deliver are lost.

Tom also pointed me to another Microsoft partner 90 degree software who have a new reporting solution that was designed using Windows Presentation Foundation, and integrates really nicely into the Microsoft Dynamics stack. I've attached a link to Tom's discussion with Michael Matrick - Co-founder and President. These guys will actually be exhibiting at BI Conference in Seattle - so if you get the chance I'd encourage you to go and have a look at some of the cool stuff they're doing on our platform.

Incidentally - if you're not regular readers of Tom's blog - I'd encourage you to check it out.

Finally I wanted to draw your attention to the guys at Proto.

Proto is a Windows based mashup application designed to join your desktop apps with the web. You need the Windows application to both create and use the mashups. It’s component based, joining your desktop and web apps by pulling data from your desktop applications, such as Outlook, and feeding it into online web components, such as Yahoo! maps. Guys if you're reading this - I'd love to see the mashup recreated using Microsoft virtual earth . Proto has the Visual Basic for Applications development environment (VBA IDE) and Adobe Flash baked in, so you can create your own modules to pull and display data from your applications.

Extremely cool.

So what of Microsoft BI and a foray into the world of Web 2.0 - it's a question I get asked a lot. I think priority 1 for us at the moment is getting the rich-client performance management solution in market - but there's huge amounts of work going on within our Live Services group at the moment which we'll hopefully be taping into in the not too distant future. We're discouraged from hypothesizing any more than this but it's certainly something I'd love to see.

Technorati Tags: PerformancePoint Server, Performance Management, Web 2.0, Sharp Anaytics, Proto, 90 degree Software, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Microsoft

De-constructing the "Angry Cinnamon"

btamblyn — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 16:43:00 GMT

So why the angry cinnamon - A good question: READ I have absolutely NO idea. A term used internally and although I don't know it's exact origin - I'm crediting Chuck Mitten who works in the Microsoft OBA Partner team in Boise.

So let's break this down.

BI has historically been a ‘read-only’ business. The IT department delivers a great, clean, trusted data layer. The users grab that data in rich tools like Excel and they develop insights. But what happens after that? Unless you translate your insights into a plan, and record that plan somewhere, we’ll never know if your insights, and your actions, made a real difference to the business.

So let’s say I am retail analyst and I'm doing some store analysis. I need to interact with and use complete data, sales and expenses which is delivered from the operational data store, I use corporate data, fully burdened by allocated costs, and I decide that we need to move two inside sales reps out to the sales floor.

In PerformancePoint, we record that decision. You’ve effectively changed your resource allocation. You are now accountable for that decision. Next month, or maybe next quarter, we can compare your forecast with the new resource allocation to actual data and we’ll all know if that was a good decision or not. And one of the great things about accountability is, the flip-side of that coin is auditability. In PerformancePoint, we know who saw what data, because we log that, who made what decision, because we made BI read-write and of course, we know the result.

The other nice feature of PerformancePoint Server is that because we’re at this higher level of the stack, we can give each user the right amount of data to make a decision; not too little AND more importantly not too much. Generally we use Excel. So, when the sales forecast is due, we send the sales rep a link to a spreadsheet. In fact, it’s a link to the PerformancePoint server. When the user hits that link, we generate a spreadsheet that has the right amount of data for that user, the correct, current data. They add their inputs to the forecast, submit it and we move it along to the next person in the business flow, usually the manager. The user never had to hunt for data, never saw too much data or the wrong data. We record what they did, when they did it. And the whole time, the user was just ‘using Excel’ something they already know how to do. This is good for users of course, but it’s good for IT departments too. Because, deep down, we’ve taken this formerly document oriented, hard to control, hard to manage process and made it a centrally managed, controlled, database process. But the users just keep using Excel…

OK, so when we talk about Microsoft business intelligence and performance management we look at it from three perspectives:

SQL Server as the technical BI platform
Office as the user platform and;
PerformancePoint as the business platform

And we use these platforms to help us answer the questions below:

Starting from the top right hand corner the first two are really about monitoring your business . The third is analysis, plain and simple. The last two are really about planning. And it’s a cycle. You see something happening, you delve into it and you make a plan to address it. Or you have a plan, you watch for actual results. If they are anomalous, you do some analysis. In Performance Management we support the whole Monitor, Analyze, Plan cycle. Today we have two products in the market at this tier of the stack. Business Scorecard Manager 2005 is our tool for monitoring your business. It, working with SQL Server Analysis Services and SQL Server Reporting Services, answers those first two questions; What happened? And what is happening? ProClarity 6.2 is a tool that adds value to Analysis Services and address the third question; Why?

In the summer of 2007 we’ll merge these two tools, actually the next versions of these tools with a new planning component to form PerformancePoint Server 2007. We’ve been working on the planning component for a while. It’s important because not only does it address the last two questions, but it also adds the corporate aspect of trusting your decisions, and the accountability.

By corporate, we mean two things. First, decisions should be made using data that reflects corporate reality. Going back to my sales analysis from earlier, using data at the store level might lead to one set of decisions. But when I factor in corporate effects, like regional and national costs, I might make a very different set of decisions. So PerformancePoint includes an engine that does consolidation, allocation and inter-company eliminations. The second part of this is making decisions in the context of the corporate process. So if I want to budget more advertising dollars in my region, that plan needs to be approved by my boss. Or my sales forecast has to go to my district manager before it gets locked down. PerformancePoint includes the functionality for implementing your company’s business process in the decision making flow.

Anyway, that’s the stack.

So when I begin to deconstruct the stack and look at partner services the opportunities are plentiful. What's really interesting is the services at the top of the stack in the Performance Management layer. For example services such as metrics development involve highly strategic engagements requiring close interaction at board level to ensure firstly that you're helping your customer to measure the right things and also help them to drive business alignment down and across the organisation. Gaining pervasive adoption therefore emphasise's the need to drive a structured business change programme. Because of the highly strategic nature of these activities - they represent a premium level service, and you're therefore able to charge accordingly. We can assist by reducing the cost of software acquisition and utilising existing technology assets.

If we look at the concept of business process consulting we can begin to draw some similar conclusions. Business methodologies such as balanced scorecarding, activity based costing and six sigma are extremely useful in providing a framework for Performance Management however in isolation they are just that - FRAMEWORKS. A methodology without a performance management process will undoubtedly end in failure. Equally a performance management process that needs to integrate disparate planning & budgeting, forecasting, and management reporting applications will ultimately lead to extra time and cost that needs to be absorbed by either the partner or passed on to the customer potentially putting the performance management programme and your services revenue at risk.

So that's it. As always I'm looking for feedback - so feel free to leave a comment at the end of this blog post and I'll be sure to respond.

Technorati Tags: PerformancePoint Server, Performance Management, ProClarity, Business Scorecard Manager, Partner, Microsoft, Business Intelligence

Marriage

btamblyn — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 20:03:53 GMT

Oracle announce the acquisition of Hyperion

According to an article in the New York Times it would seem the BI world's worst kept secret is in fact true.

There's a couple of interesting conundrums here.

As Chris Webb suggests "surely existing Essbase users will now be questioning its future and be looking for migration options".

Hyperion also has an existing investment in tools to support planning and modeling which will add greater value to Oracle's existing PeopleSoft and Siebel practices - something we're also doing at MS to align our Dynamics offerings to PerformancePoint.

It would perhaps be arrogant to suggest that this acquisition is a direct response to our own plans around PerformancePoint but Gartner in particular has been suggesting that the market would eventually be dominated by "mega-vendors".

This is perhaps further proof of this.

Here's a link to the Oracle announcement

Technorati tags: Oracle, Hyperion, PerformancePoint, Microsoft, Gartner

Fine Tuning SQL Server 2005

btamblyn — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 22:59:45 GMT

Here's a link to the SQL Server Best Practices Analyser (BPA). In short it provides guidance for OLAP database analysis and recommendations for fine-tuning performance.

Technorati tags: SQL Server 2005, Microsoft

Google vs. Live Search

btamblyn — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:12:58 GMT

This video is absolutely brilliant and is now doing the rounds on the blogosphere. Now I don't want to suggest that using Google could cost you a fortune BUT...

Video: Who Wants to be a Millionaire

Just so some of the context is not lost here. Millionaire host Eddie McGuire is also the boss of channel 9 in Australia who have a stake in MSN.

Technorati tags: Fun, Blogging, Google, NineMSN, Live Search

My name is...

btamblyn — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 14:49:12 GMT

Ben Tamblyn

I was at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Partner Day on Wednesday and met some great partners who are beginning to look seriously at the Microsoft performance management platform as a viable and cost effective alternative for their customers. There was some amazing feedback on the solution offering given that the planning, budgeting, and forecasting components of the PerformancePoint solution is still in BETA.

Equally as interesting was the fact that some of the guys in attendance are also regular readers of my blog. Jim Plant asked me during one of the breaks why my name was not published anywhere on my blog which surprised me a little - so I went back to check and sure enough Jim was correct.

It was quite timely as it happens, because there's been a lot of talk internally about providing contact information (should I/shouldn't I) including email addresses and telephone numbers on blogs.

So here's my take on why its just a GOOD IDEA.

Blogging provides a human face to an organisation like Microsoft and allows us to connect with an audience that it's just not possible to meet with one-to-one.
We each have a responsibility to change the perceptions many people have of Microsoft, and making ourselves inaccessible confirms the misconception that we are arrogant, aloof and misguided - none of which I believe is truly representative of the large majority of people working at Microsoft.

Incidentally my contact information can now be found in the "About" section of this blog. Jim - my apologies for the oversight.

SQL Server 2005 BI Training

btamblyn — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 12:07:29 GMT

Amazingly this has only just become available. Perhaps everyone in the UK understands SQL BI so well that we didn't need to publish training options until 18 months after launch. I know this has been something Emma has been pushing for a while now so it's nice to see it's arrived.

SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence Bootcamp

Dates:

26th Feb: London
19th March: Maidenhead
16th April: Maidenhead

Technorati tags: SQL, SQL Server 2005, Microsoft, Training, Business Intelligence