How Does BI Work?
Business Intelligence (BI) delivers on a simple promise: to improve business performance by driving better decision making throughout your organization. When you're confident that your insight into corporate data is sound, informed, and complete, you can trust that all your decisions will help you create competitive advantage and achieve corporate objectives.
But for BI to reach its potential, it must have the flexibility and functionality to extend from the individual through the team to the organization. BI must also be responsive to the different needs of people in your organization and take into account all the information- structured and unstructured, you use to make decisions.
Decision Solutions BI can deliver all that through three key steps that facilitate trusted, confident decision making at all levels of your organization.
Step 1: Provide Quality Data
The foundation to a successful BI solution is trustworthy data that people can access and understand easily. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is the BI platform that brings all your data together, no matter where it resides, and helps you improve your data processes. SQL Server 2005 offers an enterprise-ready and proven engine that can store huge amounts of data, scale to the largest enterprise needs, and support high query loads, high performance, and clustering.
Data warehousing is one way to build and deploy a trusted enterprise data source.
Step 2: Gain Deeper Insight and Facilitate Better Decision Making
To help people work as a team, you have to provide a way for people to bring together all the information they use, whether it comes from e-mails, the Internet, a corporate data source, a hallway conversation, or any of a hundred other places.
Microsoft has made a huge investment in the 2007 Microsoft Office system, improving integration and functionality to allow you to seamlessly analyze, visualize, and gain insight into data by means of the already familiar Microsoft Office environment.
Reporting and analysis tools help information workers access and investigate the data necessary for better decisions.
Step 3: Align Decisions with Corporate Goals
The first two steps help people make decisions as individuals. This step helps improve corporate-level decision making across your organization. You can use the integrated set of tools in Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 to build a comprehensive performance management program that supports organizational decision-making processes.
Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 was built to support corporate and line-of-business scenarios, from sales to HR and operations to finance. Decision making now has a greater context that captures the workings of your entire company.
Performance management harnesses the tools, applications, and data involved in decision making, helping to align strategies, people, and processes.
The Result: Unlocking the Potential of Your People
Individuals have access to high-quality data. They can make better decisions and trust that their decisions are aligned with corporate goals. Microsoft BI supports business environments from small to enterprise. It grows as you grow, and it's a small investment for a large return on trust that can help you build your business's success.
If you're going to unlock the potential of all your employees, your teams, and your organization, you need more than one tool, data source, or application. You need a BI solution that allows for flexibility with the security, administration, and centralization that the IT department requires to do its job. And you need it all at a price that allows you to get the tools and the applications to everyone in your organization.
The Decision Solutions BI solution delivers a full range of personal, team, and organizational BI tools, tightly integrated, that work the way you do today.