These days it seems we’re inundated with information that impacts how we make decisions. Information drives our individual goals, the work across our teams, even impacting the overall results our company is able to achieve.
In the past, the challenge was that we didn’t have the capability to get to the information—the tools were rudimentary, there were not enough data connections, the bandwidth was not there. Today’s challenge is that information is everywhere you look, we have too much of in in so many systems and now it’s hard to capture it to really help with our work.
We get information from so many sources:
- Consolidated financial reports generated by finance
- Reports developed against databases for various LOB applications
- Spreadsheets generated by individuals across the organization
- Budget and forecast data captured via email and Excel
- Data Marts and Data Warehouses developed for various business processes by IT
The challenge for organizations, teams, and individuals is to find an efficient way to harness the power of this information. There is a great need to reduce the effort required to find, develop, and interpret this information.
That’s where Self-Service BI comes into play.
Microsoft divides Self-Service BI into three distinct groups when describing the type of Business Intelligence that we use.
These are defined as:
Personal BI:
Personal Business Intelligence is information available and delivered to people when they need it, in the desired format. IT may integrate a self-service business intelligence platform to reduce the backlog of requests. Typically there is little or no IT involvement.
Personal Business Intelligence is information available and delivered to people when they need it, in the desired format. IT may integrate a self-service business intelligence platform to reduce the backlog of requests. Typically there is little or no IT involvement.
Team BI:
People don’t work just as individuals but in groups and teams to complete projects. Business intelligence for Teams delivers information that reflects this, providing business intelligence that focuses on the ability to promote collaboration, and rapid sharing of information to drive to a common decision. IT May be involved in helping to develop these BI solutions.
People don’t work just as individuals but in groups and teams to complete projects. Business intelligence for Teams delivers information that reflects this, providing business intelligence that focuses on the ability to promote collaboration, and rapid sharing of information to drive to a common decision. IT May be involved in helping to develop these BI solutions.
Corporate BI:
Corporate business intelligence describes a set of tools that help people align their objectives and activities with overall company goals, objectives, and metrics. It is business intelligence that helps synchronize individual efforts by using scorecards, strategy maps, and other tools that connect to corporate data. IT is very involved in developing these soluitons.
- Microsoft Excel 2010
- PowerPivot Add-in for Excel 2010
- Report Builder 3.0
- Reporting Services 2008 R2
- Visio Services for SharePoint 2010
- Excel Services for SharePoint 2010
- PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint 2010
Microsoft defines the use of these tools in the following manner:
Let's start with Personal BI and the advantages of using Excel 2010 and the PowerPivot Add-on.
What is PowerPivot and how can it help you...?
PowerPivot is an innovative Excel add-in enables Excel power users to easily create BI solutions by streamlining the integration of data from multiple data sources. This enables interactive modeling and analysis of massive amount of data (in-memory) and supports the seamless sharing of data models and reports through Microsoft Office SharePoint 2010.
Traditional business intelligence solutions are OLAP centric. OLAP was developed to rapidly answer multidimensional analytical queries. Relational queries off of a database server rely on hard disks to return a result set which quickly become the platform bottleneck with a lot of users. OLAP pre-computes and aggregates the data into summarized views so that query response time is almost instantaneous.
In-memory business intelligence takes advantage of column based data structures (as opposed to row based tables or pre-aggregated cubes), and uses the already available lightning fast RAM to aggregate and calculate millions of cells on your regular Desktop (or on any cheap data server for that matter), without the long lasting table scans and indexing techniques that are required by traditional OLAP & OLTP systems. Coupled with modern, intuitive user interfaces, it lets users slice, dice and filter data in a way that is easy to learn.
PowerPivot allows Business Analysts and Power Users to connect to multiple data sources (include web based data), model analytics charts and reports, and share this data with other users.
PowerPivot extends the typical three dimensional pivot table into an n-dimension reporting environment that uses Slicers to allow users to drill through the data in any way they wish.
As part of PowerPivot, the Slicer feature is by far the most groundbreaking because of how it can instantly turn 200 million rows of data into a manageable data set. You can use a slicer as a report filter, and you can also have it linked to more than 1 object at a time, making it dual purpose. Slicers can be added vertically or horizontally, and they auto-fit wherever they are placed. The best part is that as you add slicers, they are automatically linked together behind the scenes, which means if you were to select 2009 in the year Slicer, the Month slicer would shade October, November, and December gray because data does not exist for those future months of the selected year.
An example of the PowerPivot Window and the reporting capabilities:
If you have Office 2010 installed you can download and install the PowerPivot add-in.
There are some great videos and tutorials on this site so it is a great place to get started.
If you have Office 2007 installed you're going to need to upgrade or just download the 30 Day Free Trial of Office 2010.
My next post will concentrate on the other tools defined for use in Personal BI and how they can be delpoyed to drive better access to data and create advanced visualizations.
Cheers,
Bill Ryan
Bill Ryan
