Business Intelligence Practice
Business intelligence is about unlocking the true value of
information within an organization. While this is an obvious
statement, far too few of smaller organizations believe they can
unlock this value. We can help make this possible, and can do
so in a way that is affordable and is repeatable. We can
leverage MOSS 2010 Performance Point as a tool suite to quickly and
easily capture and report on key performance factors that are
crucial to your business success.
Information is a key business asset. Leveraging information to
better understand your business can translate into operational cost
reductions, improved service levels, increased market share,
etc. Most organizations tend to undervalue and underutilize
information. Polls have shown that a mere 4% of executives claim to
be in a position to obtain important metrics and key performance
indicators in less than 1 day after the end of a reporting period.
This leads to key business decisions being delayed or made with
little or no supporting factual data which unavoidably results in
increased risk to the organization.
Most organizations make significant investments to capture,
secure, and protect data. But to what end? For an organization to
leverage its IT investments, it must find ways to reap considerable
benefit from them. Transforming data into information and
ultimately evolving to business intelligence contributes to improve
the quality and speed of business decisions by using tools such as
scorecards, interactive dashboards, and enterprise reporting.
In a typical organization, data is compartmentalized or
scattered throughout. In fact, the vast majority of organizations
continue to use spreadsheets created by individual users for data
analytics. Not only does this approach not deliver the needed
information but it also results in inconsistent views of the
enterprise, lengthy reporting processes, and most importantly
reporting errors.
In order to be transformed into business intelligence, data has
to be collected in such a way that it can be accessed,
consolidated, and analyzed. This may sound obvious, but many
businesses are really just starting to understand this. The level
of maturity of an organization's information management systems and
processes determines how much effort needs to be invested in
building Business Intelligence solutions. The maturity model
progresses through data collection and evolves to Information Management and
eventually to Business Intelligence.
Moving left-to-right in the maturity model means transitioning
from historical reporting models to predictive analysis models.
Making this transition goes far beyond simply implementing a set of
sophisticated tools. Predictive analytics is the latest trend in
business intelligence. It essentially refers to developing
forecasting models based on trends and patterns identified by
mining and analyzing existing data.
An organization's first Business Intelligence implementation
must be kept simple. Business users need to be considered and
involved in the design of the solution. It is generally recognized
that 90% of the information workers in most organizations can be
categorized as non-technical business users. This supports the
approach of starting simple and evolving into more complex
solutions.
The Tango Group's business intelligence solutions are built
using Microsoft's reporting and analysis platform and delivered via
MOSS 2010 Performance Point. We believe this to be a cost effective
approach to deliver high value business intelligence solutions
using familiar, user friendly tools. We typically integrate the
Performance Point components directly into a client's existing
SharePoint 2010 portal.
