Altius Community

Altius strengthens its Sales and Marketing Efforts

Kate Rounding — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 09:58:00 GMT

Altius Consulting is pleased to announce the expansion of its sales and marketing team with the appointment of Marketing Assistant James Teodorini. James has experience within the areas of IT and Marketing and joins Altius on a 12 month placement whilst working towards his Business Management degree at the University of Surrey.

Working closely with Altius’ Marketing Manager Kate Rounding, James will be focused on developing the Company’s online presence and supporting relationships with key technology partners.
Kate Rounding comments: “We are pleased to welcome James to the team, and this addition highlights Altius’ commitment to an increase in marketing and sales activities over the coming months”.

A full house for 'Spreadsheet Heaven' breakfast briefing

Kate Rounding — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 12:03:00 GMT

22 senior representatives from 15 organisations recently attended the Altius briefing breakfast at the Pomme D’or hotel, Jersey.

Jonathan Cowle - Financial Director at Altius - took the audience through the reasons why organisations create and build business processes that are reliant upon spreadsheets. He then explored some of the most successful approaches to reducing business’ dependency and its associated risks of running processes (often financial) on spreadsheets, which include:

Discovery: risk evaluation, Spreadsheet link and dependency analysis.
Control: using audit tools and versioning - including SharePoint 2010
Replace: use excel, but against trusted data to provide ‘one version of the truth’ reporting and data capture.

Those that attended found the event extremely beneficial:

“A truly excellent event, pitched at exactly the right level”
“The content was extremely relevant to some of the issues we are currently facing”

To receive a copy of the presentation, please email cievents@altiusconsulting.com quoting ‘Jersey Briefing’. – Please note that this is a large (2mb) pdf file.
For further details of our future events, or to register your attendance at our next breakfast briefing (City London, October) please email ukevents@altiusconsulting.com.

The Benefits of Good SharePoint Design

MikeVinson — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:50:44 GMT

With the recent release of SharePoint 2010 and all its new functional goodness, the temptation to upgrade or install a new instance has become even more tempting. More and more companies are coming around to understanding the benefits that SharePoint can bring to their business and now that many have taken the plunge to roll out Office 2007 (or even 2010!) this is no longer a barrier to integration.

With the evolution of geographically-diverse offices and workers, thanks to the increased availability of broadband and mobile phone access, the case for SharePoint has never been stronger. According to a survey by CitrixOnline - “70% of employees see access to mobility devices and applications as key to productivity”. As connectivity options become more available, this can only increase further. Having access to corporate information whilst working from anywhere with an Internet connection is a very attractive proposition to employees and employers alike. Flexible working is something that is becoming more and more important in this modern world and offering such facilities can be a big advantage when attracting new recruits into the business.

Establishing a corporate intranet using SharePoint can help your business to achieve this objective. However, SharePoint’s biggest strength is also one of its biggest weaknesses. Time and time again, I come across companies that have happily installed SharePoint within the business and have sat back and expected users to magically produce a fully functioning corporate intranet just through general use. SharePoint is extremely intuitive to most users and anyone with an understanding of how a web page works can come to grips with it. Here-in lies the problem - it becomes a sprawling mess very quickly. Sure, this can be managed via permissions but once ‘Owner’ permissions have been granted to a user at Team Site level, who knows how far down the rabbit hole goes in terms of sub sites, lists and libraries. Trying to find something specific? Good luck. Even assuming that search has been configured correctly, no doubt there will be three or four different versions of the same document in different libraries dotted around the place.

Designing a corporate intranet is not easy but it is something that is vital for a successful implementation. In order for the design to be correct, all the different parts of the business must be consulted and requirements gathered. These requirements should capture how users intend to use SharePoint functionality, how sites should be structured, what lists and libraries they will need and so on. These requirements not only help to establish a great foundation from which to build your SharePoint intranet but can also help to streamline your business and identify less than optimal processes. Holding user workshops will also raise awareness (and hopefully interest!) of the project and inevitably good ideas will come out of them which can be incorporated into the design. It is only once the requirements have been gathered that the SharePoint implementation can be designed in such a way that the structure of the intranet makes sense to those that are expected to use it.

A fully-fledged SharePoint implementation is designed to form the information backbone of your corporation. As such, it will touch upon and affect every area of your business. It should be viewed as a great opportunity to ‘get your house in order’. For example, file shares should be analysed to establish who exactly ‘owns’ files contained within them. One advantage of doing this is that duplicate files and overlaps in information ownership can be identified and dealt with. The owner of individual files will determine under which area of the intranet they will live. Old files should be archived off and the remaining ones uploaded to the appropriate team site and library. If your Active Directory could do with some organisation, this is a great opportunity to get this ball rolling. Organisation Units and Groups can be created to mirror that of the SharePoint structure. This will also make user permissions easier to maintain in the long term.

The ‘look and feel’ of the SharePoint implementation is also very important. Sure, the vanilla theme is OK but it is important that the style of the site is fitting with your corporate branding and colour scheme. It needs to be an extension of your business rather than a separate entity. By approaching your site design in this way, you will get greater buy-in from your users and combined with promoting the site internally, you should start to see its use increase. Ideally, the goal should be to have SharePoint the first point of call when looking for information within the organisation.

Business Intelligence and the exposure of performance management information should also be incorporated into your intranet design. Typically, the implementation of a BI solution built on top of SharePoint is managed via a separate project but, nonetheless, it should be kept in mind when designing your SharePoint implementation. SharePoint 2010 has seen much tighter integration with other Microsoft enterprise products such as Office 2010, Visio 2010, Project Server 2010, PerformancePoint analytics and the SQL Server Business Intelligence stack. Management and operation performance information that was once contained within spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations can be made available via the intranet by publishing them to SharePoint. These documents can be viewed in the browser rather than downloaded to a client machine making access to information much easier and quicker for those working remotely with less than ideal Internet connections. PerformancePoint dashboards with analytical and interactive reports can be built to expose performance management information contained within databases or other data stores within your organisation.

Once you have consolidated all your corporate information into a nice, clean SharePoint intranet, the work does not end here. Good governance is critical going forward to ensure that all your hard work does not go to waste. Periodic reviews of the structure and content of sites should be conducted to ensure that information is not being duplicated across the site or, even worse, being saved to shared drives! Once the intranet is live, there is a compelling argument for removing access to shared drives for this very reason. Improving the site iteratively based on user feedback will go a long way in ensuring that users continue to use the intranet and increased productivity is maintained.

So what are the benefits of all of this hard work? This is a good question to which the answer depends on the extent of the effort that you went to. However, ultimately the benefits should be (at a minimum):

Greater accessibility to information for those that have the right to it combined with increased security of information for those that don’t.
Elimination of duplicated documents and files.
Greater content ‘ownership’ with information stored in intuitive locations.
Removal of old, out of date information with a promotion of new and relevant information across the business.
Increased productivity of workers by spending less time looking for certain information.

There are many other benefits that SharePoint can bring to your business when designed and implemented correctly. However, a SharePoint project should be taken seriously and investment in requirements gathering and design is critical in its successful implementation.

Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Videos now online

JohnGamble — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:47:00 GMT

The Business Intelligence videos from last weeks Microsoft TechEd 2010 Conference are now available on-line and available here. They are all excellent and I certainly recommend watching them if you get the chance. Some standouts from the sessions I attended are:

The BI Keynote speech: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/Keynote02
A deep-dive on the PowerPivot technologies: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/BIE401
Delivering an End-to-End BI solution (in just over an hour!): http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/BIO205
Introducing Master Data Services: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/BIE203
Enriching the Analysis Services UDM: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/BIE304
Culture as the culprit behind BI Project failure: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/BIP205
Best Practices in Fast Track and Parallel Data Warehouse design: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/BIE306; and
Finally the BI Power Hour is always worth watching: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/BIO207

The full list of all the conference sessions can be found here: http://www.msteched.com/

TechEd 2010 – Day 4 – What happened to planning?

JohnGamble — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 17:59:14 GMT

This week I’ve seen some very impressive demos. As well as PowerPivot and SharePoint I’ve been to sessions on Master Data Services, Advanced Analysis Services UDM modelling, Fast Track Data Warehouse (RAID discussion at 8am – good start to the day!), Parallel Data Warehouse, best practices in SQL Azure development, a fascinating session by Howard Dresner (ex-Hyperion / Gartner) on corporate culture being the root cause on many BI project failures; another Gartner session on how SharePoint 2010 can enable collaborative decision making; using MS BI with SAP; a number of case studies and implementation stories; and a brilliant session on software estimation and why it is so hard.

With everything that is good, however, there is the not so good and whilst it was refreshing (and amusing) to see demo’s go wrong for Microsoft staff too, there was one topic that was conspicuous by its absence. Planning. Ok, not entirely true. There were two sessions that had the words Planning or Budgeting in the session titles, one using SharePoint and the other PowerPivot, but neither were about Planning. The SharePoint session was a case study which talked about one companies approach, including an innovative the use of InfoPath as a rapid application development tool. The PowerPivot session was really about programming. This session showed how it was possible to model items you don’t get “out of the box” such as many-to-many relationships, semi-additive measures and dynamic sets by using a mixture of DAX and MDX. Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying the sessions weren’t any good, far from it, but neither was about what I’d call planning.

The SharePoint session came closest as it did at least have scenarios, business logic and allowed data entry. The PowerPivot presenter Alberto Ferrari, stated up front that we wouldn’t be seeing an a planning application, so he at least set the scene. But there were none of the features such as planning cycles, approvals, rules engines, versioning, etc. you would expect to find in application such as Hyperion Planning, Clarity, OutlookSoft or even PerformancePoint Planning. No excel clients either which was also disappointing. I suppose you would need the techniques Alberto showed to produce a planning application (semi-additive measures are crucial for finance apps looking at balances), but it wasn’t what I, or indeed the rest of the audience, was expecting.

The closest we got to excel data entry in the week was a quick demo in Analysis Services UDM session where we saw that Excel 2010 has finally enabled write-back support. But even that is just MS playing catch-up to Hyperion who offered that feature years ago. Where I’m going with this, and this is just my opinion, but it appears Microsoft has no interest in providing their own planning application. They seem content to let people either build what suits them, or let a third party (e.g. Clarity / OutlookSoft) provide the software. All of the components are there, for instance versions and scenarios, are just dimensions, rules could be coded in MDX, SharePoint has workflows and can provide web-based data entry through the new BCS features, and we finally have write-back native inside Excel, but it’s up to you to put it all together, incurring development time and costs. Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting is part of BI and a crucial activity for organisations to undertake. You lose value of BI apps if you’ve nothing to compare the metrics against.

Overall this has been a really good week, and despite a dedicated planning application, the Microsoft BI platform looks extremely strong and very compelling. There will be benefits for companies who decide to go for SharePoint 2010, Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2, especially when you put them all together. I personally can’t wait to have a play and demo some of the new stuff to clients. Just need to convince a client to let me! Regarding cloud services, we shall see how that takes off. It will be a success as the benefits of lower TCO, scale out, service and maintenance are real, but initially it will be smaller applications that will go there. Personally I still need convincing on security of data, especially from a BI perspective.

Finally a quick tip for presenters. Windows will not automatically hibernate if you have a virtual machine running and you just shut the lid on your laptop. Be warned if you do that, stick it in your bag and head off to your presentation, heat will build up and something may melt. If it can happen to Donald Farmer it can happen to you.

TechEd 2010 – Day 3 – “Raise your hands if you think you won’t need to know anything about SharePoint.”

JohnGamble — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 05:35:22 GMT

No keynote speeches today, so instead I took the opportunity to attend some sessions on PowerPivot and found that in most of them SharePoint was being discussed nearly as much as PowerPivot.

First up was a deep-dive session into the technologies underpinning PowerPivot led by Dave Wickert, Principle Program Manager at Microsoft. Wickert described the technical architecture surrounding PowerPivot and its components of Excel, Analysis Services and SharePoint. In fact Wickert didn’t spend much time talking about the Excel client at all and most of the session was devoted to the additions to SharePoint that enable PowerPivot applications to run, refresh themselves and be monitored and controlled by IT.

You can see quite quickly that SharePoint 2010 is going to be crucial to the effectiveness of PowerPivot in an organisation. Wickert had a workbook containing 3.9 million rows and it’s file size was a little over 100 Mb. That’s a seriously big Excel workbook and I can’t see IT being too happy about that being emailed around. The other, slightly more serious, point is that PowerPivot applications are also intended to be data sources in their own right too. As PowerPivot is essentially in-memory Analysis Services that means that the current and new versions of Reporting Services, PerformancePoint, Excel and other PowerPivot applications can all use PowerPivot as a data source. In this way you can use Excel 2007 to do ad-hoc analysis or create Reporting Services or PerformancePoint dashboards from a PowerPivot data source. To do this you reference the data source as a SharePoint URL. You can’t do it directly from the filesystem as typically the workbook won’t be open and have the in-memory AS engine instantiated. This isn’t the case on SharePoint. Whilst it’s not running all the time, SharePoint will load the workbook into the SharePoint servers memory as and when it needs to. There is a final point here for the SharePoint 2010 deployment people. If an organisation embraces PowerPivot then you might find your SharePoint server needs quite a bit more memory than you were originally intending.

The second session on PowerPivot I attended was aimed more at the end users. In this session Julie Strauss – Analysis Services Program Manager demonstrated how to build applications in PowerPivot. Strauss showed some of the less obvious features such as resolving data type conflicts, DAX filters, “paste and append” copy-paste methods, using Linked Tables, breaking links to linked tables (really not obvious), date sorting in slicers and how role-playing dimensions were supported (sort of..).

The third session that I’ll talk about was the BI Power Hour. For those of you who don’t know, this is a chance for Microsoft to have some fun building applications in the new technologies that really have little real world value, but illustrate capabilities. We were shown, amongst others, SSIS reading and posting wall comments to Facebook; a working version of Pac Man written in Reporting Services; a almost real-time SharePoint dashboard showing twitter posts about SharePoint; and a Chess game written in Excel Services and displayed in SharePoint. This one was most impressive as it used a VSTO web-service to connect to a University on-line chess computer to provide an opponent to play against. PowerPivot also had two demos. Julie Strauss followed up on her earlier session by showing PowerPivot reports analysing data from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, showing that a ridiculous number of people hurting themselves whilst shopping and with vacuum cleaners. Finally Donald Farmer showed an application based around World Cup statistics. Take note, in all World Cup games in history goals are most often scored in the 90, 45, 18, 88, 85, 82 minutes of games.

Overall it was a fun and very interesting day, but I thought that the mood today from the presenters (aside from the BI Power Hour Session) was a little bit more sombre than yesterday. PowerPivot applications were demoed that contained 1000’s of lines of workbook code rather than millions. Let’s be clear on this, Microsoft loves PowerPivot, but we were reminded that it is still version 1 software. Just because you can put millions of rows into the application doesn’t necessarily mean you should. There will come a point where it really does make more sense to use Analysis Services rather than PowerPivot for your application. Microsoft leave it up to you to decide when that is, but as PowerPivot doesn’t support features such as hierarchical dimensions, custom rollups or many to many relationships then Analysis Services cubes aren’t going away anytime soon. It definitely seemed to me that AS is being repositioned as a tool for strategic applications with PowerPivot intended for personal or perhaps team use.

Yesterday Ted Kummert’s BI keynote speech talked about the new BI tools, being familiar, enabling collaboration and being managed by IT, and today we saw technically how that all fits together and some very good demos. The clear message Microsoft is pushing is that SharePoint is the hub of their new set of BI tools and is just as important as SQL Server. This importance was underlined when Dave Wickert opened his session asking us to raise our hands if, from a BI perspective, we thought we wouldn’t need to know anything about SharePoint? Do you think anyone put their hand up? Point made.

TechEd 2010 – Day 2 – BI for Everyone!

JohnGamble — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:46:22 GMT

Microsoft have just shown off a PowerPivot workbook with 2,000,000,007 rows in it, and it still sorted and filtered the whole data set almost instantly. They were demoing this new coming-soon feature the BI Keynote session given by Ted Kummert, Senior Vice President from Microsoft in response to one of the items of feedback from the initial release of PowerPivot. The community feedback was that despite being able to put 100 million rows in a workbook, this was not enough, and they are right too. 100 million rows is a comparatively small fact table and for PowerPivot to produce some really amazing applications it will have to do much better and be able to consume vast quantities of data. In truth they were cheating a little bit, but in doing so they also demoed another feature of PowerPivot features that may make the next release. This version of PowerPivot had been opened in the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) and when imported it will interface with an actual Analysis Services server sitting behind the scenes. So more power and the ability to handle 2 billion plus rows.

PowerPivot in BIDS is one small part of the message coming from Microsoft about their current and future BI offerings. “BI for everyone”, according to Kummert, was a vision presented at the Seattle BI Conference in 2008 and is now available. It’s been built into Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 releases and anyone deploying these will be able to benefit from its capabilities. Kummert described the offering as similar to a “utility capability”, something that “is just there for every end user to tap in and use.” In order to achieve this Kummert described three distinct features of the new tools:

1) Familiarity

This is about providing the right tools for the right people to help them with BI. Typically this is Excel, but now it also includes items such as BIDS, Visual Studio 2010 and the new Report Builder 3.0. It’s whatever tool the user is comfortable in. Excel and PowerPivot will no doubt cover the majority of end users but certain end users will have requirements which mean they have to go to other tools. Report Builder 3.0 and Report Parts is an example of another enhanced end user application that helps people do self-service BI, manage and change their reports, hopefully without having to get the IT department involved. Don’t worry consultants / IT department you still have an important role, it’s just a little bit different.

2) Collaboration

Collaboration is seen as extremely important part of the new BI tools with SharePoint 2010 being pushed as the centralised hub that enables sharing, social networking, search and collaborative decision making (more on that in another post sometime). New features of SharePoint 2010 that were shown in yesterdays keynote were demoed again and expanded on a bit further. In 2010 users can rate, comment and “like” reports and other documents that are published. Doing so will post the activity on your own personalised homepage and people in your network will see the fact that you like a new report. If this sounds like Facebook, then that’s because it is very much like it, but with the concept extended into a business context. Anyone with access can rate a report in a similar way you can rate this blog. Give me 3 out of 5 stars and I know I have to try harder. New search capabilities through FASTSearch were also demoed again, and the BI Indexing Connector was announced. This enables BI data contained in reports to be indexed and used in search results.

What this does is increase the capabilities of social and peer reviews of work reports and other documents that are published. Workspaces or sites that present data can be enhanced with discussions, commentary and other social networking reviews. If used properly then this unstructured data allows you to see the decision making thought process that complemented the data and so provide an audit trail of thought as to how and why a decision was made. This is perhaps another aspect of BI that we often lose site of. You can provide the right data to people, but they can still make bad decisions. How often do you have email conversations about what to do if an area of your business is underperforming, or a KPI has gone red? Have these conversations in SharePoint and you have a searchable repository of decisions linked to the data.

3) Managed

Collaboration leads nicely on to the last feature Kummert described, that of a managed environment, and this is where the IT department fits in. IT add value here by providing security, governance and overall management of reports, improving the overall trust in the data being displayed and consumed. Not having to do ad-hoc reporting or creating /amending reports allows IT to concentrate on the more strategic applications such as data warehouses and AS cubes. Publishing reports to a secure library in SharePoint, rather than emailing them around, enables reports to be managed, version controlled, and most importantly known about by the IT department. In SharePoint Central Admin, the IT department can monitor usage of PowerPivot reports and see the data sources that are contained within them. This improves compliance by allowing IT to validate and ensure that the data sources are the correct.

To me this all sounds great, and it’s difficult to disagree with any of it. The problem that I can see, however, is that to get the best out of these tools requires much more than just installing and making them available for use. These tools enable different ways of working, and that requires cultural shifts and business change which is going to be much more challenging than getting the applications up and running. These are, however, great new features and do look like a very compelling offering. It will be interesting to read case studies around it’s use.

Future technologies

So what of the future, what’s coming next? Without giving any dates away Microsoft talked about enhancements for the BI stack to take advantage of Cloud technologies, Consumerisation, Compliance and Data Volumes. Cloud, the claim is, will provide both infrastructure and end-user benefits. Reporting and analytics are to be part of forthcoming releases of SQL Azure. Consumerisation (is that a word?) will be enhanced by new end user tools such as PivotViewer (available next month), and compliance is handled by Master Data Services enhancing data quality and cleansing. A new tool was shown here that can map the flow of data between applications and let you know what other items may break should you change something. “Like” this one…

Finally Microsoft expect lots of different types of data to be available and stored in the coming years. They expect Cloud based sources such as those provided by Project Dallas to create a market place for data sets that can be purchased and consumed. These and other sources will increase the required capacities for the volume of data being stored and this is to be handled by the forthcoming Parallel Data Warehouse technologies.

A sneak preview then of the vision for Microsoft BI and what’s coming next. Familiar, Collaborative, Managed. Overall, it sounds like a step in the right direction to me.

TechEd 2010 – Day 1 – Cloud is a major transformation of the Industry

JohnGamble — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 04:11:50 GMT

“Cloud is a major transformation of the [IT] industry” was the message from Bob Muglia, President of the Server and Tools division of Microsoft and keynote speaker on the opening day of the 2010 Microsoft TechEd conference. His message was that cloud computing is changing the dynamics of IT and Microsoft’s next generation of platforms, tools and technologies will support cloud based services and make it easier for organisations to switch to the cloud and achieve the benefits of cloud based applications and services as well as getting the most out of existing investments.

Cloud computing was always my bet for what Muglia was going to talk about, but what surprised me was that just how much Microsoft seem to have it covered. Muglia and the other presenters talked about five opportunities, or dimensions as he called them, of cloud based computing and how Microsoft has tools and products to help organisations achieve the benefits that the cloud provides. He listed them as:

1. Servers and applications

This is not only Windows Azure and SQL Server Azure, on which sit SharePoint, Exchange, BizTalk, etc. but also a new Application, Identity and Management model which bespoke, customised cloud based applications should adhere too. Windows Azure and SQL Server Azure are new cloud-based versions of the platforms we all know and Microsoft want them to be the foundations of this new breed of applications. The proposed common model of Application, Identity and Management is achieved through .NET 4.0 (formally announced to some cheers from the audience), a new Active Directory which can extend from local implementations to a cloud, and Microsoft System Centre. This last product not only deploys and manages virtual machines in a cloud, but also manages virtual applications too. If your not with me on this last one, think of a traditional n-tier application with data, application and presentation layers which may often sit on their own separate physical servers. If this is an application which you are intending to deploy in a cloud, then through Visual Studio 2010 you can define the virtual machine parameters (memory, hard disk space, etc.) that the tier requires. Then when you deploy the application you do it in tiers, complete with their own virtual machines (produced automatically and deployed), and then swap them in and out as you see fit.

Also an Azure version of AppFabric was described which will allow you to combine “on-premises” and cloud based applications. The example given here was CRM and ERP systems. These applications are not going to be switched to the cloud overnight, but AppFabric will allow the data in them to be shared to cloud based applications and vice versa. Active Directory will be extended from local implementations to handle security.

Finally Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be released in July. Service delivery departments be ready was the message.

2. Enhancing Personal and Social Interaction

The second opportunity Muglia talked about was the ability of cloud based applications to enhance personal and social interaction. More specifically, Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, Live Meeting and the announced Communications Server 14 will all interact together and provide more advanced capabilities for VOIP, conferencing, collaboration and sharing and “Facebook-style” social networking. SharePoint 2010 becomes a central hub here with information stored in SharePoint profiles (photos, interests, expertise, etc) all being searchable and visible thought Outlook and Office Communicator. They also said that SharePoint 2010 had a new feature whereby it can “infer expertise” that a individual has through the blog / wiki / “wall postings” that a user makes and that you can do expertise searches. Wouldn’t mind seeing that one in action …

3. Smarter Devices

The third item was that of smarter devices and the ability to run and consume data from these cloud based applications on smart phones and other devices (there is a car in the exhibition area that is running Windows – I’ll try and find out more). Windows 7 Mobile was demoed connecting from a phone to a cloud based SharePoint site, from which a user downloaded an Excel Spreadsheet, added some comments and saved it back again and opened it up on a laptop. Also announced was:

Internet Explorer 9 (complete with support for HTML5 and with enhanced graphics acceleration – no doubt with Silverlight in mind); and
Intune, a new cloud based tool to manage PC inventory management and patch roll outs.

Unsurprisingly no mention was made of the new iPhone, also announced today, but given the number of people who had them in the audience I suspect support for them won’t be far off.

4. Learn, decide and take action

The fourth item was the BI one. Cloud, the claim is, brings more information to your business, and PowerPivot is the tool to help you use it. Through PowerPivot you can combine not only your internal data, but also any Open Data Format or RSS data feeds that might exist in a cloud. Project Dallas is an initiative to provide lots of new data feeds (I think some free and other subscription), including data, imagery, and real time web services, and these can also be loaded into PowerPivot to enhance your own data and improve insights and understanding. Publishing the PowerPivot report to SharePoint allows sharing and collaboration, and also (and this was new to me) creates a Analysis Services data source, running in SharePoint which can be used by other applications (e.g. PerformancePoint, Reporting Services or other PowerPivot workbooks. A new Silverlight application called PivotViewer (Live Labs Pivot) was also demoed with quite a response from the audience. A mash-up of PivotViewer and bing maps was shown with an equal response.

5. Opportunities and responsibilities

The final item was that of opportunities and responsibilities. Microsoft CIO, Tony Scott took this final session and talked about which applications in Microsoft are being redeveloped to be cloud-based and how Microsoft were benefiting from this experience. SharePoint and Exchange were described as two applications which were “mature” in their cloud based versions and able to be used by others. Regulatory and security challenges about the data being held were being addressed (no answers given..) and how the Microsoft data centres were the most environmentally friendly ones they’d ever built.

So there we have it, it’s all up in the air, so to speak. Microsoft are really pushing the cloud as a new application platform and trying to make it as simple as possible to migrate applications. Whilst quite exciting in keynote, the talk afterwards, however was a little more sceptical, with people questioning whether line of business and legacy core trading platforms will ever be migrated. Probably not I suspect, rather data migrated to new cloud-based versions should the business case be compelling. Microsoft seem to acknowledge that the applications they’ve migrated to the cloud are the ones that are relatively recently built and have peak usage at only certain points in the year. An example was given of a web based auctions application that is only used a couple of times a year to raise money for charity. It has massive peak usage and they admitted that sometimes it didn’t perform very well. They extra hardware was too expensive to justify the spend on an infrequently used application. Migrating to the cloud solved this problem as the hardware scales out accordingly and more money was raised for charity this year than ever before. .NET applications like this will probably migrate quite easily to the Azure platform. SQL Server Azure also seems a good bet to do really well and I can see people deploying SQL databases out to cloud based servers quicker than migrating applications. Muglia admitted that there was a long way to go, but he was excited about what partners and other firms will do with these new tools and cloud based services.

What does this mean for BI? Well PowerPivot, Project Dallas and PivotViewer look very exciting, and that’s not to mention the other new toys SQL Server 2008 R2, Office and SharePoint 2010 have. The ability to generate more insights and more easily combine data from lots of different sources can only be beneficial in the long run. I also saw a very good session on Master Data Services and another on SharePoint’s new Business Connectivity Services. More about those later. Before I can comment further, I need to understand further the issues and solutions proposed around data security and regulatory compliance. Private clouds may be the way forward here and for organisations already with data centre investments this might not be too much of a leap forward. Solve these issues and cloud services for BI could really take off.

Jersey ‘Discover Spreadsheet Heaven’ Business Breakfast

Kate Rounding — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:22:00 GMT

On Thursday July 8th, Altius Consulting (CI) will be holding a short breakfast briefing on Spreadsheet Hell.

During the briefing we will discuss the continued challenges organisations face from an over exposure to financial applications and processes that are run on complex, un-audited spreadsheets.
With over 14 years experience of helping Finance Officers to embrace the flexibility of spreadsheets, control their use and ‘keep them in their rightful place’, we at Altius Consulting have helped our clients realise the following benefits:

Reduced reporting cycles
Higher data consistency
Enhanced compliance
Better insight into data previously

The breakfast briefing will take place at the Pomme D’Or Hotel, St Helier, Jersey from 7.30am – 9.15 am.

For further information on the event and to register your attendance, visit the Jersey Heaven and Hell events page.
http://www.altiusconsulting.com/Altius_Event_Heaven_or_Hell.aspx

Simplifying system issues reporting - technical

marc.garraway — Tue, 18 May 2010 14:07:00 GMT

This follows on from my first blog and looks at the technical aspect of the ELMAH to Gemini process.

Over this little series I have introduced ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers), Exchange web services and Gemini. This blog is going to discuss how they all link together.

By linking the whole process simply when an application throws an error it will get recorded inside Gemini.

An overview of the process

ELMAH is set up and created within an application
The application errors and an exception is thrown this causes an email to be sent
Email received in mailbox ready to be processed
An automated task is ran to check the inbox for new messages
If there is a new message, subject is passed to get Gemini project Id
Error tag looked for in body of email, check error against current issue
If issue exists leave message, if not create issue in Gemini, pass in body and subject
Email sent to project team with details of new issue

ELMAH - Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET

What is it?

ELMAH is a tool developed that plugs into an ASP.Net website and logs errors within the application, without the need to re-deploy the application.

For more information on ELAMH look at the Google project page http://code.google.com/p/elmah/.

Microsoft Exchange Server Web Service

What is Microsoft Exchange Server Web Service?

Exchange web service is an API into the exchange server; it allows you to carry out many of the tasks you are able to do within Outlook but through a programmable interface.

How to get going

Exchange has its API open already; the only thing that is needed is to make sure you have an Exchange user that you can use for the development work. Within Microsoft Visual Studio the first task is to create a web reference to the Exchange interface; once this is done it will open up the API for the developer to use.

There are some basic rules for the Exchange server. Once you connect, it return a web reference object and you must use this object all the way through the process.

Connecting to Microsoft Exchange Server

To connect you need to request a “ExchangeServiceBinding” object from the Exchange web service, once you have this object you can pass it around the application and use it where needed.

You can connect to the inbox and get all the messages, once you get a list of messages you can then go through each one. When you get the list of messages back there are some properties associated with it such as sender, but other properties such as subject and the body of the message are stored within another method. For each message you will need to get back the whole message using “MessageType”. This allows the whole message to be received and then from this object you can get all the properties of the message. These properties can then be pasted into the Gemini API.

Gemini Web Service API

What is Gemini?

Gemini is a web based issue tracking system developed by Countersoft (http://www.countersoft.com/products/gemini/Control.aspx).

Why do Altius use it?

Altius has service level agreements (SLA) with clients and the Gemini system is an interface between Altius and a client.

Gemini is used to track project issues and change requests from creation through to resolution. The main advantages of using an issue tracking system are:

It provides easy logging of issues without needing to worry about who to contact
Allows all interested parties to:
- View all issues
- View the current status of a given issue
- Keep track of the issues and who is assigned to each issue
- View a complete history of the issue
Provides a knowledgebase so that other Altius team members can understand the previous action taken when similar issues are raised.

About Gemini

Countersoft has developed Gemini since 2003. It is written using the Microsoft .Net Framework. Over 5000 companies are using Gemini, with many different sizes from small to enterprise companies. In the latest release of Gemini (3.6) there is a REST API that supports XML and JSON.

Gemini has a .Net API which is accessible through three DLL’s and this API provides access to most of the Gemini functionality.

Pros and Cons of using Gemini Manually

Pros
- It provides easy logging of issues without needing to worry about who to contact
- Allows all interested parties to:
  - View all issues
  - View the current status of a given issue
  - Keep track of the issues and who is assigned to each issue
  - View a complete history of the issue
- Provides a knowledgebase so that other Altius team members can understand the previous action taken when similar issues are raised.
- Everyone who is linked to a project is notified of any issues
Cons
- Raising an issue manually can be laborious
- People ignore the error and don’t raise an issue
- Mistakes can be made

The Gemini API

Within Visual Studio I created a Window Console application, and added the three DLL’s as a reference. These libraries provide simple access to the Gemini API via web services within your application

CounterSoft.Gemini.Commons.dll
CounterSoft.Gemini.WebServices.dll
Newtonsoft.Json.dll

The "Commons" assembly contains Gemini entities such as IssueEN, ProjectEN, ComponentEN, etc.

The "WebServices" assembly provides easy communication to Gemini REST Web Services -- it provides the ServiceManager class.

Once you import these references into your project the whole Gemini API is available to you. For more information about the Gemini API documentation visit: http://api.countersoft.com/Default.aspx. This webpage has an index of the API and details all the methods that are open to a developer.

Creating an issue in Gemini is simple - the key is preparation. Before you start on an application you must set up the project, add users to the project and select the default settings.

Setting Up Gemini

Within each projects is a project administrator who is a user who has the appropriate rights to administer the project. Once the project has been set up, the appropriate permissions have been set and the users who will be working on the project have been added, the administrator can set the default values.

For the next set to work in creating a partial issue there are several fields that must be set:

Affected Versions
Component
Risk Level

I would personally set other properties such as, priority, visibility (everyone) severity, resolution (unresolved) and status (unassigned). Dates and work can be left blank and type (bug in example) is passed in through the issue as an issue type.

I found that creating a Automated Gemini User was best way as this could be used throughout all the different projects held within Gemini, but you must remember to add the user to all the projects that will use automated issue creation. If you do not, then the process will return an error as the user does not have the correct access.

The project also needs to be set up correctly with project users having the correct email notifications otherwise a issue will be created and nobody will be notified.

The Coding

Now you can go ahead and code, open Visual Studio and add the reference to the solution. Now you are ready.

The code below shows what you need to create a partial issue within Gemini.

   1:  private static bool RunGemini(string summary, string description, int projectId)

   2:  {

   3:      bool success = false;

   4:      //log into the SLA system

   5:      string txtURL = @"Gemini URL";

   6:      string txtUserName = "username";

   7:      string txtPassword = "password";

8:

   9:      try

  10:      {

  11:          //log into the SLA system

  12:          ServiceManager serviceMrg = new ServiceManager(txtURL, txtUserName, txtPassword, "", false);

13:

  14:          //get the users details

  15:          UserEN user = serviceMrg.UsersService.WhoAmI();

16:

  17:          //create instance of the issue class

  18:          IssueEN _issue = new IssueEN();

19:

  20:          //------------------- create the issue ------------------------------------

  21:          //get the project id "168" = Test Project

  22:          _issue.ProjectID = projectId;

  23:          //issue title

  24:          _issue.IssueSummary = summary;

  25:          //issue description

  26:          _issue.IssueLongDesc = description;

  27:          //user whole logged the project

  28:          _issue.ReportedBy = user.UserID;

  29:          //isseue type -> 11 = "bug"

  30:          _issue.IssueType = 11;

31:

  32:          //send the issue to the SLA system

  33:          IssueEN iss = serviceMrg.IssuesService.CreatePartialIssue(_issue);

34:

  35:          //successfully logged project to the SLA system

  36:          Console.WriteLine("Issue has been logged");

37:

  38:          //set the return value

  39:          success = true;

  40:      }

  41:      catch (Exception ex)

  42:      {

  43:          //throw exception if it has failed

  44:          Console.WriteLine("Error: " + ex.ToString());

45:

  46:          //set the return value

  47:          success = true;

  48:      }

  49:      //returns the result

  50:      return success;

  51:  }

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You still need to set the correct URL, username and password for your instance of Gemini. You then pass in the issue summary, issue description and project id. This has now created an issue by taking information passed in and the information taken from the issue defaults.

Then run the code with some parameters

RunGemini("Test Issue For Blog", "This is a test issue for my blog", 168);

If you open up Gemini, login and navigate to the project you still now see the project details and the issue just created.

Image below shows the project summary:

Image below shows the issue:

From the image above you can see that the issue has been created and the correct issue summary and description have been passed in. The blue box on the left shows the default settings that have been set for this project to allow the issue to be created.

Simplifying system issues reporting - overview

marc.garraway — Tue, 18 May 2010 14:06:00 GMT

At Altius Consulting we use an issue tracking system to help our clients report any problems quickly and easily (once they have signed a Service Level Agreement (SLA)). The system we use to track these issues is Gemini - an application developed by Countersoft (www.countersoft.com).

For some of our clients, we have developed ASP.NET front ends providing them with easy access to reporting, etc. A Google tool ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers), can then be linked into the ASP.Net website, detecting and reporting any errors that occur within the application.

Within ELMAH all the unhandled errors are sent back to a mailbox. Developers can then access and investigate any reported errors within the mailbox. Unfortunately there is no way of flagging and tracking these issues once they land in the mailbox and it takes extra project management time to assign and sort these issues.

Gemini obviously has the ability to provide this tracking facility, but does not naturally link in with the ELMAH mailbox. So, how do we get emails from the mailbox into Gemini? One solution would be to use the Gemini Scheduler; however, this would require a new mailbox for each project, and the need to change the EMLAH configuration for each application, which doesn’t really solve the problem.

To solve the problem, we have developed a small windows application that reads the exchange mailbox inbox regularly, creating an issue within Gemini using the Gemini API whenever a new email is detected. All the details are copied from the email into the newly created issue and the originating email deleted. Duplicate detection has also been set up, so that any issue generated within Gemini with the same name as another issue will not be created.

This has several benefits:

People do not need to keep checking the mailbox.
The issue can be tracked so that people can see how the fix is progressing.
It reduces wasted time for project managers, who no longer need to read multiple emails.
It allows Altius to use and manage one mailbox for all ELMAH issues and these get assigned to the correct project.

A technical blog will be following soon.

Silverlight 4

marc.garraway — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:04:16 GMT

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft released the latest version of Silverlight (version 4). This release has lots of new features and capabilities, Scott Guthrie has a great Silverlight 4 Release Blog. One of the recommended installs is the Silverlight Toolkit, this toolkit has a collection of controls, components and utilities made outside the normal release.

When looking through this page I noticed a new section which has some Silverlight 4 samples. The application can be viewed in the browser from http://www.silverlight.net/content/samples/sl3/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html and it supports out of browser.

This application shows many Silverlight tools and gives you the XMAL and code behind files to allow you to use them within your own application, very useful if you are new to Silverlight or looking for a tool with a specific need.

As Silverlight is being integrated into SharePoint 2010 it will be fantastic for data visualisation. The toolkit can be downloaded from here and you will also need to have Visual Studio 2010 and the Silverlight 4 Tools and SDK installed. Once everything is installed the toolkit will allow you to drag on the extra controls to your canvas.

SQL Server 2008 R2 RTM available via the trial edition?

MikeVinson — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:52:01 GMT

I just downloaded the trial edition of SQL Server 2008 R2 and noticed that the version number is 10.50.1600.

This was also displayed at the bottom of the new query window:

It would appear that the RTM version is now available via the trial edition!

Does PowerPivot mean I’m out of job?

JohnGamble — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:27:53 GMT

I gave a quick demonstration of Excel 2010 and the new PowerPivot add-in to a client today and they were impressed. One piece of feedback though caught me a little off-guard which was, “does this tool mean you’re out of a job?”.

It’s a very good question, and got me thinking. With PowerPivot users can create in-memory OLAP cubes on the fly. Not only that, but with SharePoint 2010, reports can be published for sharing and collaboration. I know some very good Excel users who, no doubt, could create some very impressive applications using it. But what does this mean for the BI consultant, for me? Am I redundant?

Well, un-surprisingly the answer is “No”. I don’t think PowerPivot does put me out of a job. PowerPivot attempts to address the balance between the IT department and end users. It allows for much more complex ad-hoc analyses than previously in that it can combine data sources much more easily than before, but the data sources are still the realm of the IT team. Cubes, datamarts and warehouses will still be needed to provide cleansed, conformed and structured access to the data. If they are not then the “Spreadsheet Hell” scenario that organisations can find themselves in could be about to get a whole lot worse. Think about it, even more data sources and layers of complexity in the reporting model… PowerPivot is also not an ETL tool. A user may create a fabulous model combining data from many sources, but it will be at a point in time. To remain relevant it will need to be kept refreshed with up-to-date data. Warehouses and Data marts do this automatically.

What PowerPivot means is that I get to be a BI Consultant rather than someone who can build OLAP cubes and if anything PowerPivot makes my life better. The essence of Business Intelligence is to empower decision making by supplying the right data, to the right people at the right time. PowerPivot is another extremely valuable tool helping me do just that. It’s not trivial to add new or ad-hoc data sources to cubes, marts or warehouses, but PowerPivot goes someway to making this situation better. Data sources, previously out of scope in reporting are now in-scope. If the addition of these proves valuable, we can then consider adding them to the warehouse on a regular basis. Through PowerPivot we can help users generate more insights into their customers and themselves by combining data in ways previously not possible.

For the IT department, PowerPivot allows more focus on service delivery and not be sidetracked into immensely complicated SQL queries and Excel workbooks. IT doesn’t “know” the data. Users “know” the data. Now they have a way to combine it as well as access it.

Excel 2010 – First impressions and PowerPivot

JohnGamble — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 12:30:09 GMT

Got a new toy. Recently I had a trip over to England and was able to grab some technical preview ISO’s including the one for Office 2010 beta. Now what I’m really after is a chance to play with PowerPivot, but I thought I’d share some initial thoughts on Excel 2010 too.

First of all installation. Pretty straightforward if you ask me. Once the installer was running it asked me if I wanted to upgrade Office 2007 or “Customise”. I didn’t really want to lose Office 2007, so I thought customise and sure enough there was the option to install the products side by side. I then left the installer and no further prompts were required by me. I should point out that this probably wasn’t a standard install in that half-way through the install I had to leave the office and so I hibernated the laptop. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this didn’t affect the install at all and when I started the laptop again it just carried on. I also found I was able to use other Office products whilst the install was taking place (not really surprising when as I went for the side by side install), but I was surprised to find that I could run Outlook 2010 before the installer had even finished. Word of warning here, even though I did go for side-by-side install, Outlook has been upgraded. Still all seems well and my Xobni plug-in has ported across too.

Next up Excel. My first observation is that it is fast. I selected it from the start menu and it just appeared. Very quick. Most impressed. Second observation is that the “Office Button” (circular thingy top right) has gone and replaced with an old/new fashioned “File” Tab. The “Home” tab looks the same as before, but under “Insert” there are some new toys. Sparklines and Filters.

Sparklines seem very similar to XLCubed’s microchart technology in that you can put a chart in a single cell in a worksheet. You have “Line”, “Column”, and “Win/Loss” options and based on a simple data range produce some fun results (see below). I can see these being used a lot for dash-boarding.

But what I’m really after is PowerPivot. That is a separate install and quick and easy. All I had to input was my name. Marginally slower start up this time due to the PowerPivot add-in, but only noticeable as the first launch was so quick.

Notice Analysis Services in the add-in name on the splash screen. That’s the first clue to what this is all about.

PowerPivot is Microsoft’s new in-memory OLAP engine which is available as an add-on for Excel 2010. It’s been talked about in the BI circles for quite a while now as the first in what is perhaps a new generation of self-service BI applications. In case you don’t know, PowerPivot allows users to load potentially hundreds of thousands of rows into Excel and then allows the user to pivot on them to generate new insights and business intelligence. It can load data from multiple sources including databases (such as SQL Server, Analysis Services, SQL Azure and other vendors such as Oracle, Terradata, DB2 and Sybase); RSS feeds, other Excel files, text files and a host of others. Once loaded you then define connections or common fields between the data elements and then you pivot away. Reports and analyses produced can be published to SharePoint to enable collaboration and sharing.

Typically the problem with Excel was that it was restricted to limited amounts of data. Whilst it was, and still is, fabulous for reporting and analysis, you couldn’t really get enough data into it to really see trends and analyses. OLAP technologies filled the gap (Essbase, for example, stands for Embedded Spreadsheet Database) and these allowed vast quantities of data to be aggregated and summarised across multi-dimensional reporting hierarchies. This was a fabulous advance, but the problem here is that these are technical products which have been the realm of consultants and specialist IT staff. The other problem is that the cubes or datamarts are often designed for specific purposes. They may not contain all the information you are looking for. With cubes it’s not trivial to add in other sources of data.

PowerPivot attempts to address this balance and give reporting and ad-hoc analysis back to the user. Using PowerPivot users can now combine data from their warehouse with other data feeds and systems not yet incorporated into the data warehouse environment. It’s intended as an end-user tool not something that’s the sole property of the IT department.

There are some good tutorials and YouTube videos on how to use PowerPivot and using these I was able to very quickly start browsing and reporting on the Adventure Works database that comes with SQL Server 2008 R2. Slicers, report filters and sparklines. Nice and simple.

Slicers are a new feature. They are not a new concept in the BI world, but might be to end users. They are subtly different to filters in that they are typically not as granular as filters. I was impressed how PowerPivot “knew” that “Sales Territory Group”, and “Sales Territory Country” slicers were related and so selecting “Europe” in SalesTerritoryGroup, greys-out Australia, Canada, NA and United States. Adding the Sparklines was simple enough and this report is almost ready for publishing.

But how simple was it? Well, to be honest very simple, and this is what impressed me the most. Having only really heard about PowerPivot and seen a couple of YouTube videos I was able to connect to data sources, and produce reports quickly and easily. Anyone who has experience in querying cubes from Excel 2007 should be up and running quickly. PowerPivot does have it’s own query language, called DAX, and hopefully I’ll take a look at that later. But overall I’m impressed.

Free SQL Server 2008 R2 e-Book

Matt Quinn — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 05:47:23 GMT

As Business Intelligence features make up a large portion of SQL Server 2008 R2’s feature set it’s important for IT Directors and BI Managers to be armed with the facts as they evaluate and plan use of their features.

Customers with earlier editions of SQL Server and Software Assurance can look to leverage the great value add features that are part and parcel of 2008 R2 with minimal additional investment.

Of specific BI-centric interest are:

PowerPivot features for delivering Team-centric BI models build using PowerPivot
Integrated Mapping within Reporting Services – utilising the power of Bing Maps within reports
Master Data Management Functionality delivered with Master Data Services
Complex Event processing with StreamInsight
Scalable & Massively Parallel Data Warehousing

This free SQL Server 2008 R2 e-Book, including extensive coverage of the SQL Server Business Intelligence features.

Thanks to Devon Musgrave at Microsoft Press for sharing the link to the book: Devon Musgrave

Oracle EPM 11.1.2 Now Available

GraemeOrd — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 08:42:17 GMT

So, after announcing that the release of a major new release of the Oracle EPM suite was imminent on April 7th 2010 (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/066183) , we have been waiting with bated breath to get our hands on the software.

Daily since then I have checked the Oracle eDelivery site to see if it was available for download and each day, much to my disappointment, nothing… until today when a gleaming new media pack for “Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (11.1.2.0.0)” appeared in my search results.

So, I have now started the process of hammering our network connection to get all the software downloaded and ready to be set up an initial development environment.

To whet your whistle, here’s a few of the new features that are available in this release:

New user-interface for Workspace
Intelligent approval workflows in Hyperion Planning
Web-form development for Hyperion Planning that enables better business user productivity
SmartView integration with Microsoft Outlook
Improvements to Hyperion Profitability & Cost Management (HPCM) including expanded cost and revenue driver function
Tighter integration between Hyperion Financial Data-Quality Management (FDM) and Oracle Essbase, EBS and PeopleSoft

Keep an eye on this blog as I will be posting about my experiences with installing, configuring and using EPM 11.1.2.

Business Intelligence addressing Retail challenges

Matt Quinn — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:49:44 GMT

This year’s Retail Week Technology Summit looks set to deliver an exciting agenda focused on applying smarter technology to help retailers build their business, maximise their multi-channel opportunities, reduce operating costs and grow market share by retaining and expanding your customer base.

As Retail Business Intelligence specialists, it is no surprise to see that many of the headline topics for discussion have a direct Business Intelligence theme:

Reduce costs in the whole business - Financial Analytics, Activity-based costing, benchmarking costs, using BI to help identify cost-saving opportunities
Be more efficient – Providing your teams the analytical tools to do their job quickly and effectively – helping them avoid spreadsheet hell and becoming slaves to copying and pasting in workbooks, freeing them to spend less time manipulating, more time analysing.
Get closer to their customers – Monitor customer trends and patterns, survey customers and use to profile buying behaviours and make appropriate changes to your business, focus and target your proposition to specific customers based upon their needs and desires
Get more out of their IT spend – Utilise existing investment in Core-IT to help deliver more valuable information from the data and systems you already own
Run a better ecommerce and multichannel business – utilise BI technologies and techniques to bring information together from across the business – unifying multiple channels, multiple functions and getting a 360-degree view of the modern retail business
Increase transparency in the supply chain – Using collaborative tools to share information across organisational boundaries throughout the supply chain. By linking Sales & Operational Planning, Demand & Availability planning throughout the supply chain, you and your suppliers gain visibility, insight and pre-emptive management of issues
Develop more exciting stores – Utilising information and the Web2.0 experience to bring online and new-media experiences to your in-store environment

The agenda promises an interesting show, but if you can’t wait that long – get in touch to find out how Retail Business Intelligence can help you today.

Metrics and Brussel Sprouts: You Might Not Like Them, But They're Good for You

GlenChambers — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 22:02:44 GMT

With economic uncertainty and budget cuts as the norm, IT is under relentless pressure to deliver more and better services at a lower cost. While metrics can require considerable time and effort to develop, and then to report regularly, there are many reasons to make such an investment. For IT leaders, being able to recognize and develop effective metrics is becoming an increasingly important competency.

Enterprises not currently using metrics to manage performance have much to gain. There are many benefits to be had from an effective IT metrics program, including more sophisticated data center management, better alignment with the needs of the business, and higher levels of competitive advantage, as illustrated below in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Competitive Advantage Gained from Metrics

However, lack of manager commitment is the number one killer of an IT metrics program. Be aware of common concerns and how to handle them to ensure success of your metrics initiative efforts.

Commonly Held Objections to Metrics

The introduction of any new measurement process can inevitably bring with it some objections. Some of these objections may be totally legitimate, while others can be addressed with proper education and implementation. An example of the former is the concern that IT managers and their staff could be assessed against a new suite of metrics. This issue can be quite complex and must be resolved between management and human resources.

Costs: “We don’t have budget for a metrics program.” It is true that there will be costs associated with a metrics program, but ongoing costs should not be high. Any method of measurement does have costs (labor, software if necessary), but metrics provide tangible benefits; some provide risk containment/mitigation benefits and others may provide direct financial benefit by pointing out areas of excessive cost or inefficiency. If collected and applied properly, IT metrics meet both of these objectives. In regulated environments, it is also important to note that some level of IT metrics may actually be required as part of a compliance program. This, of course, should factor into any cost-benefit decision.
People: “We have good IT staff and managers.We don’t need metrics to tell us that.” Good people are the backbone of any organization, and the best metrics system in the world cannot make up for the lack of skilled, competent, dedicated staff. It may even be the case that business management is in close communication with IT and is very much in the loop. This argument makes most sense in a static environment, where people and management do not change much. However, change is more the rule than the exception in today’s business environment. Staff and management roles are more fluid than ever before, and even stable organizations can undergo mergers or acquisitions. This being the case, it becomes important to institutionalize a system of measurement, feedback, analysis, and act upon metrics so that IT’s value and effectiveness is demonstrated.

The Small Enterprise Conundrum

Small enterprises are often apathetic when it comes to IT metrics. When discussing metrics and benchmarking with enterprises with less than 10 IT staff, research group Info-Tech found that many feel no need to track and report on metrics, or benchmark themselves against their peers.

The Most Common Objection? Size: “Our business units know what IT does. Because our business is constantly changing, I don’t see any value in actually putting resources towards trying to define those metrics.” – IT Manager, small distribution company

There are two points here. First, small companies often become larger companies, so the control system that IT metrics provide can help manage growth. Second, while it may be possible to chug along without metrics for a while, it is likely that problems in IT service will arise or that metrics will eventually be requested by the business. Rather than wait, it is better for IT to be proactive in anticipating and reacting to problems.

The quote above raises an important question – how much time, effort, and resources should small enterprises spend on developing a metrics, benchmarking, and reporting infrastructure? The majority of the commitment is in the planning and preparation phase, and it is not trivial, but the rewards can be significant.

The Good Outweighs the Bad (or it should)

“If You Can’t Measure IT, You Can’t Manage IT”

With greater emphasis on accountability and performance, IT leaders can better communicate IT performance and effectiveness to the enterprise through the use of metrics. Even if metrics are not being enforced, politically savvy and proactive IT leaders will find value in capturing and using metrics to demonstrate quantifiable measures of control within IT.

IT leaders should have a vested interest in collecting and analyzing metrics from their own departments. Staffing levels, helpdesk performance, and other metrics can assist IT professionals in managing people and assets more effectively. The ability to do so can have a positive impact on the IT budget as well as the performance of the IT department as a whole.

Dovetailing with Current Benchmarking Initiatives

Business executives and unit managers are probably already studying benchmarks or best practices for key business processes. It is difficult to justify why IT should not be benchmarked as well. In fact, benchmarking IT only solidifies the importance of information technology in the enterprise. Like most other business processes, IT is also worth measuring.

Making Better Sourcing Decisions

It is rare to find a management team that has not been approached by onshore or offshore service providers with compelling arguments for why they should provide technology services to the enterprise (typically including a pitch for lower costs and better service). Without a robust system of IT metrics and appropriate feedback mechanisms in place, it may be difficult to support or refute some of these arguments. Metrics allow management to see how IT funds are being spent and what the results are in concrete terms, and will provide a basis for comparison for any outsourcing or co-sourcing proposals.

Creating Efficiencies across IT

The following list represents some of the IT management areas that can benefit from metrics:

IT operational budget planning
IT capital budget planning
Staffing levels

Then, of course, there are the IT operational areas that can benefit from metrics:

Server performance
Storage management
Network performance and availability
Project management
IT security incidents
Disaster recovery and business continuity
Data center operations
Help desk efficiency

Recommendations

Be proactive. Start small, but start; don’t wait until you’re forced to build them. To be valuable, metrics need to be measured and evaluated over time. Start building a foundation of base level metrics. In the short term, this may be in a spreadsheet or simple database. As the metrics, measurement, and reporting requirements evolve over time, this may evolve into a more robust data warehouse/BI solution.
Identify a sponsor. As with many initiatives that have a perceived lack of benefits or could effect unwanted cultural change, executive buy-in and continued support are the keys to success. Ask the sponsor and major stakeholders what they are expecting to gain out of metrics, and then communicate this to the organization. It is inevitable that many who will be involved with a metrics implementation effort — those involved in collecting and interpreting data, and those whose projects and functions will be measured — will question the value or motives of this effort. Some may even work against it, overtly or otherwise. For that reason, it is critical that a high-level executive sponsor visibly supports the metrics program. The sponsor may even choose to incentivize key stakeholders in order to ensure the success of the program.
Don’t treat metrics like a large scale project. Look for low hanging fruit, and start evaluating metrics that are already being collected. Create a process and mentality of collecting and reporting key metrics as a regular process within IT. It helps to get in the habit of reviewing metrics regularly, using them as backup and to make informed decisions.Recognize that metrics are an iterative process and will be refined and improved over time.
Avoid doing too much too soon . Start small and run a pilot program. Any new technique that generates intelligence for the business can create a lot of excitement. Realize that just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean you should. The mere fact that the data exists and can be easily collected does not mean it is necessary. This can quickly lead to an unmanageable information glut.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use available research, tools, and templates to guide the change. Some organizations will require more customized metrics which should be devised with awareness that the required underlying data to calculate these metrics is available and can be recorded on a regular basis. Also make sure that any metrics selected link with business goals and apply to pertinent projects.

Bottom Line

As IT evolves, so too does the need to be proactive in measuring and controlling the quality and efficiencies of IT. Metrics are a powerful management tool that can be used to effectively communicate, maintain, and improve IT effectiveness over time. The key to a successful program is a proactive approach to metrics development.

Learn how to get fast, Shareable insight into your business: a breakfast briefing with Red Bull, Altius Consulting and Oracle

Kate Rounding — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 10:45:00 GMT

Don’t miss your chance to attend this event! Register now!

Oracle Essbase is an easy yet powerful way to obtain and share business insight. Attend our breakfast briefing on Tuesday 11th May and hear Deborah Grace from Red Bull talk about how Essbase has transformed their decision-making and information-sharing capabilities. You'll also have a chance to see how Essbase works and discover the many ways your own organisation could benefit.

If you’re responsible for producing, distributing or analysing spreadsheet-based data for your organisation or department, don’t miss this highly practical introduction to the benefits of Oracle Essbase. The session is particularly relevant for Directors of Finance, Sales & Marketing and Operations.

Join Altius Consulting for this insightful and informative session to learn how to take your company's intelligence to the next level. You will be provided with a solid understanding of the business benefits of Oracle Essbase and discuss why customers are choosing Oracle Essbase in order to gain valuable insight into their business and move beyond silos of business intelligence and disconnected spreadsheets, giving them an immediate return on investment, as well as providing them with that all important competitive edge.

This session will also look at the current integration with OBIEE and where and when Essbase and OBIEE might be used.

When: Tuesday, May 11, 2010: 08:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
Where: Oracle City Offices, Oracle Corporation UK Ltd., One South Place, London. EC2M 2RB

For more information and to register your attendance to this event visit the breakfast briefing page

Interpreting Metrics in Business Terms

GlenChambers — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:56:02 GMT

IT departments should capture and track metrics that enable a more rigorous and analytical approach to decision making to influence the business. IT objectives for a metrics program should be to measure and minimize infrastructure IT spending while maximizing productivity for the organization. Work with senior management to include IT metrics as part of strategic projects that inevitably require IT involvement, such as the launch of a new product or application.

Also, consider developing an IT scorecard. Formally tracking IT performance as it is related to IT’s contribution to corporate objectives will ensure that long-term goals stay on track. Single metrics are less effective because they exist in a vacuum: an IT scorecard will provide a system for evaluating what value IT is providing the business. Consider working with a CxO to ensure that the scorecard follows the company-wide scorecard.

Restate Metrics in Business Terms

Tying performance reports to business objectives helps to generate a response from business leaders, cuts down on the length of IT performance reports, greatly improves the reporting process, and increases IT’s profile considerably.

When developing internal reporting objectives, focus on metrics that demonstrate how IT is increasing business value to the enterprise or reducing IT cost (see Table 1). In general, the business wants to drive revenue growth, profit, market share, and shareholder value. The more IT can link its performance scorecard to these high level objectives, the better.

Table 1. Tying Business Objectives to the IT Balanced Scorecard

Business Objective	IT Scorecard
Lower IT costs leading to greater profits.	Internal operational efficiency and resource optimization metrics.
Greater user satisfaction, productivity, and retention mean lower costs and better value to customers.	Improved reliability of IT infrastructure and service delivery metrics.
Better value for shareholders.	Risk reduction and mitigation through IT governance initiatives.
Customer retention, revenue growth, and profitability.	Greater customer satisfaction from external facing systems.
Profitability and lower exposure to risk, ultimately leading to shareholder value.	Financial accountability and positive ROI for IT investments.

For most IT leaders, what this means is changing the way they think about metrics. Instead of solely using operational, technology-focused metrics for reporting purposes, they must now also include process-focused metrics that relate to service delivery and business impact. The right metrics are those that evoke an emotional response from management. It becomes increasingly important to think about what minimum amount of information must be conveyed to convince management that what IT is doing is right or wrong. Consider Table 2 below, which demonstrates how metrics can be interpreted from a business perspective.

Table 2. How Metrics Can Be Interpreted

IT Metric	Business Interpretation
The transaction server had 98% uptime this month.	Computer failures affected 75 transactions this month costing the enterprise $15,000. To fix this problem, we must invest in more server redundancy.
IT updated software asset management software on all 500 enterprise PCs.	New computer software reduced the enterprise’s exposure to a license compliance risk worth $250,000 (if audited and found lacking.)
30% of PCs were replaced this year.	Computer replacements helped improve user productivity and lowered maintenance costs by $60,000 this year.
75% of help desk requests were resolved in less than 20 minutes.	Faster help desk response times resulted in 10% less downtime this quarter, saving the enterprise $20,000.
IT resolved 1,200 tickets this month.	20% of IT staff time was devoted to resolving tickets. 40% of requests were related to the operating system. Windows Vista training for users could reduce the number of requests and save $5,000 per month in IT productivity.

Key Considerations

To integrate high level metrics with the IT department, follow these steps:

Reorient IT to a service delivery mindset. Gathering metrics is a critical step towards managing IT services, true, but adopting metrics means adopting a service delivery attitude first. A properly executed service delivery model will align IT initiatives with business objectives and eliminate gaps between what IT delivers and what the business expects. A clear understanding of how IT delivers value to users is needed to focus the realignment of IT service processes. Once this is done, it is just a matter of time before the desired metrics are reached.
Keep to a minimum the number of IT metrics tracked and reported. Metrics must be distilled into a consumable form. Part of this goal includes keeping the total number of IT metrics relatively small.
- To isolate the applications, processes, staff, and systems that are important to the business, start by addressing known and/or common issues in IT performance, be it people or technology.
- Next, identify key areas in SLAs used by management to track IT performance. Finally, look at those IT projects that had a high impact on business processes.
- If metrics are not already available for any of these areas, generate a list of projects needed in order to obtain the missing data. Ideally, it is a good idea to start by tracking 3 to 5 metrics and increase from there depending on company size, complexity, and so on.
- Always remember that IT management tools can churn out hundreds of metrics that are necessary to help proactively prevent failures and diagnose problems. However, most of these are useless to executives unless they relate to business objectives.
- Collecting, analyzing, and reporting on too many metrics is not only time consuming and wasteful, it can also be dangerous. Presenting management with a laundry list of all IT metrics available can lead to information overload and cause decision makers to lose sight of those indices that are truly important for improving IT performance.
Investigate chargeback functionality in management software. Systems management software (e.g. HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, etc.) often has the ability to calculate IT service usage for chargeback purposes. Even if there is no intention to formally charge back to business units for IT services, these tools can provide insights into IT service costs for conducting business analysis.
- For example, it may be salient for the business to know that the SAN is a $60,000 resource and that the company’s financial system is using 48% of the SAN’s overall storage resources.
- Numbers like these can help articulate real dollar costs against which savings can be measured (e.g. reduced downtime, deferred hardware purchases, faster transaction processing, etc.)
Submit quarterly IT performance reports. These should be no longer than a few pages and contain only the metrics agreed upon. High level dashboards should be easy to understand. One best practice is to use red, yellow, green reporting. In general, management really only cares about what is red, while yellow items tend to get prioritized for later resolution. For red items, provide more granular metrics that identify root causes. Report on items that are green as well, but only at a very topical level (i.e. if it’s green, it’s business as usual).
Sell IT successes. Use metrics – technology, staffing, and emotional – combined with an internal PR process for promoting IT successes. Most IT departments don’t use metrics, report on the wrong metrics, or gather so many metrics that presenting them in a usable manner becomes impossible. Develop a pragmatic approach to IT metrics and performance reporting. Tie performance scorecards to business objectives, refocus the language to generate an emotional response from business leaders, and aim to reduce the number of metrics reported.

Bottom Line

IT metrics reports that span dozens of pages and center on technology-focused metrics such as volume of mainframe batch runs, megabytes of data stored, jobs processed, or number of patches installed, will be meaningless to business leaders. If this is the current state, high-level metrics are essential.

New SharePoint 2010: Now One Stop for Collaboration and Content

GlenChambers — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:43:14 GMT

Microsoft is poised to unleash its latest set of SharePoint products upon the software market. Some names are changed, certain tools are reassigned to different product lines, and Microsoft has introduced several new features.

Still Available in Both Flavors

Many existing users were first introduced to SharePoint through Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), which is a free download with Windows Server. Enterprises that needed more functionality would purchase the full Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) platform. Although the 2010 offerings do not include a product called WSS, the ability to freely download a reduced functionality version of SharePoint with Windows Server has been preserved.

Table 1. SharePoint Name Changes

SharePoint Offering	Pre-2010	2010
Technology included with Windows Server	WSS (current version: WSS 3.0)	SharePoint Foundation 2010
Separately licensed collaboration platform	SharePoint Server (current version: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, MOSS 2007)	SharePoint 2010

Many Organizations Planning an Upgrade

69% of the organizations that were recently surveyed are planning to upgrade their current SharePoint environment within the next 18 months (Source Info-Tech group). Most of the interest lies with the paid-for version, SharePoint 2010, rather than Foundation 2010 (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Upgrade Plans of SharePoint by Version

In the past, Microsoft has been very successful using WSS as an effective pull-through strategy for MOSS. In 2007, more organizations were using WSS than those using MOSS. The numbers switched in 2009, where MOSS held 64% of the total SharePoint users. This trend is expected to continue in the next 18 months with the upcoming releases. When evaluating products, it is critical that the functionality provided with Foundation 2010 is compared against organizational needs. Figure 2.

Figure 2. WSS vs. MOSS SharePoint Usage

New in 2010

Below is a compiled a list of changes based on early documentation from various Microsoft sources. This information is subject to change prior to the official release of the products. The lists below apply to both SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

Technical Requirements:

64-bit servers only
Windows Server 2008 64-bit with SP2 or Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit
SQL Server 2005 64-bit with SP2 or SQL Server 2005 Express 64-bit or SQL Server 2008 64-bit or SQL Server 2008 Express 64-bit
Level 1 browsers (full functionality): Internet Explorer 7 or 8 32-bit, Firefox 3 32-bit on Windows
Level 2 browsers (limited functionality): Internet Explorer 7 or 8 64-bit, Firefox 3 on a non-Windows OS, Safari 3

Administration and Security:

Custom-coded applications can be deployed as sandboxed solutions.
Workflows no longer have to be associated with a list – they can be placed at site-level. Rich workflows can accommodate even more complex business scenarios.
PowerShell support enables more advanced scripting capabilities.
New logging Object Model for improved insight into server usage and performance.

Integration:

While WSS 3.0 supported Silverlight hosting within Web Parts, the new version will provide dedicated Silverlight Web Parts.
Business Connectivity Services (BCS), called Business Data Catalog in MOSS 2007, is now offered in both SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint 2010. The new version is aimed at simplifying the connection process.

Features:

The new version implements the Ribbon interface, with buttons in groups and tabs like in Microsoft Office.
The master pages for creating new site content have been restructured.
Users can have alerts sent as Short Message Service (SMS) messages to their mobile devices over Office Mobile Service Protocol.
Improved mobile device experience that adds many new types of mobile pages and public mobile controls. There will also be a new SharePoint Workspace Mobile client for Windows Mobile devices so that Office content can be taken from SharePoint offline.

Additional features available in SharePoint 2010:

Improved social networking tools such as activity feeds, personal blogs, microblogging, and tagging.
New Enterprise Content Management features such as digital asset management, document IDs, metadata navigation and filtering, updated records management, and eDiscovery.
Enhanced search features include a more interactive search experience, a ranking model schema, expanded relevance factors for social data, improved people search with social networking, expertise algorithms, and a new phonetic algorithm.
PerformancePoint Services is now a feature in SharePoint 2010.
Composites is a new piece that empowers end users to create their own no-code solutions through a set of building blocks, tools and self-service capabilities.

The full server version of SharePoint 2010 will include additional enhancements in integration with related software:

Visio Services enables real-time Visio access through the Web-based SharePoint interface, eliminating the need for Visio installation on the client. Visio Services does for Visio what Excel Services does for Excel.
The Office 2010 application SharePoint Workspace (formerly Microsoft Office Groove) extends the offline capabilities of Groove, allowing users to work with entire SharePoint sites offline. Together with Office 2010, multiple people can now simultaneously author content on a SharePoint site.
Interoperability between calendars in SharePoint and Exchange has been expanded.
New features in SharePoint Designer 2010 include a revamped UI based on SharePoint artifacts instead of file structure, a customizable Ribbon and Quick Access Toolbar, as well as simplified settings management.

Recommendations

Factor in the server costs – hardware and software. SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010 are not available in 32-bit, which means they must be installed on 64-bit servers running the 64-bit editions of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server. Unless the enterprise already has the new servers and software in place, adopting SharePoint 2010 will be an expensive undertaking. Enterprises looking to upgrade an older version of SharePoint should schedule the implementation to coincide with planned server upgrades.
Windows Server 2008 64-bit users should try SharePoint Foundation.Enterprises already running Windows Server 2008 64-bit should take advantage of SharePoint Foundation 2010 when it is officially released, since the license will be included with the server software. Most of the SharePoint-using enterprises interviewed by Info-Tech began with a pilot implementation of the included version (WSS). Enterprises new to SharePoint can begin to assess its capabilities with Foundation 2010.
SharePoint 2010 is an all-in-one solution for organizations looking for both collaboration and content features. In the past, organizations had to look at add-ons for more advanced collaboration features that could be added onto their existing SharePoint content repository. Organizations looking for more advanced enterprise collaboration features may now find what they are looking for in SharePoint 2010.

Bottom Line

SharePoint 2010 introduces several shiny new names and interfaces. Most notably, the additional collaboration features now make SharePoint 2010 a more comprehensive platform which organizations should consider for both enterprise collaboration and content management.

Jersey BCS Event - The Value of Business Intelligence

Kate Rounding — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:15:00 GMT

Next month John Gamble will be presenting to the Jersey branch of the British Computer Society on The Value of Business Intelligence (BI).

Intended as introduction to Business Intelligence, the lunchtime talk will look at:

What Business Intelligence is.
The technologies that are involved in supporting Business Intelligence.
How Business Intelligence is relevant to all organisations today.
The unique value of a BI project to an organisation.
How return on investment (ROI) often goes much further than the initially expected.

The event will take place on Tuesday 13th April 2010, at 12.30hrs in the Ouless Room, Jersey Museum, St Helier, Jersey, CI.

For further information on this event please visit the BCS events page or contact jersey.events@bcs.org with any questions.
We look forward to seeing you there.

Collaboration in Business Intelligence & Performance Management

Matt Quinn — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:24:52 GMT

Collaboration and Business Intelligence are both technologies that have rapidly evolved in recent years, each along their own independent paths. As social networking has become mainstream and more broadly understood, so the concepts of applying collaborative technology to Business Intelligence and Performance Management have evolved accordingly.

Business Intelligence is primarily about breaking down the ‘silo’ effect where information is trapped in some obscure, difficult to access system. When you look at systems as more than just a technical component or piece of software – i.e. recognise that a system is a combination of people, process and technology – it’s clear to see that collaboration has a lot to bring to bare on Business Intelligence by enabling you to break down the silos of people and process as well as technology.

Tony Crowhurst, senior writer at FSN asks the question : Is collaborative Performance Management finally here with PowerPivot?

The answer needs to be yes – implementing great business intelligence and performance management to simply leave it in it’s own silo (albeit an easier to use and more business-intelligent silo) is only solving half of the problem. Using collaborative techniques to jointly develop, share and continually improve Business Intelligence and Performance Management systems enables you to unlock BI’s full potential in a mechanic that I can see becoming ‘Agile BI’

Budget BI: Three Frugal Examples

GlenChambers — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:16:00 GMT

There are ways to implement a BI initiative without investing a fortune in expensive technology. Savvy IT and business leaders learn to leverage existing software and choose affordable alternatives.

Key Considerations

We have analyzed a broad range of BI initiatives to identify effective cost-saving methods. The case studies below describe three different types of BI tool use:

Data integration and analysis.
Reporting and dash-boarding.
Comprehensive BI suites.

Each case study identifies the business needs behind the BI initiative, the chosen toolset and how it is used, and significant outcomes reported by the organization.

Example 1: Case Study: Cost-effective Data Integration and Analysis

Source: Microsoft

Industry: Manufacturing

Employees: 14,000

BI Users: 6,800 (all knowledge workers)

Business Needs

The company's business end users were dependent upon IT support staff for exporting data from line-of-business (LOB) applications to MS excel. The company needed a way for end users to work with data from LOB applications directly, without IT intervention.
To minimize training costs and maximize usability, the ideal situation was to have users do everything in excel.

Solutions

Microsoft Office 2007 (upgrade) with SharePoint Server (new implementation)

Usage

With excel Services in SharePoint Server, users can now export LOB data directly into Web-accessible excel spreadsheets. The resulting spreadsheets can be opened in any browser-enabled device.
Improved data connectivity allows supply chain managers to extract data directly from planning and pOS systems and manipulate it in excel.

Results

A dedicated solution for data analysis and integration would have cost well over $1,000,000 for the company's 6,800 knowledge workers, including implementation and training. Instead, the company upgraded the existing Office suite and adopted MOSS 2007. Under Microsoft's volume licensing program, the cost of these changes is less than half that of a new dedicated solution.
The company has also benefited from the considerable non-BI functionality provided by Office 2007 and MOSS 2007, particularly in the area of collaboration.

Example 2: Case Study: Cost-effective Reporting and Dash-boarding

Source: Microsoft

Industry: Hospitality/Gaming

Employees: 2,200

BI Users: Managers and executive team

Business Needs

The casino's executives needed to increase the efficiency of report creation. The existing process required extensive manual data manipulation and took too long to create management reports.
The executive team also wished to improve report concision to make executive reports more easily consumable for strategic decision making.

Solutions

Microsoft SQL Server (existing implementation) with SharePoint Server (new implementation)

Usage

The casino uses SQL Server Reporting Services to generate dashboards that highlight key performance metrics.
More detailed management reports are generated through excel Services in SharePoint Server, extracting data directly from back-end systems and publishing in an excel-based, Web-friendly format.

Results

By leveraging existing SQL Server capabilities and adopting SharePoint Server instead of a dedicated reporting/dash-boarding tool, the casino saved thousands of dollars in licensing alone.
The legacy reporting process required 66 hours of manual effort per week. The new process is fully automated.
Originally, reports were made available 5-9 days after close of period. Now they are available on the next business day.
The old 48-page executive reports have been replaced by a one-page dashboard.

Example 3: Case Study: Cost-effective BI Suite

Source: BOARD

Industry: Fashion

Business Needs

The fashion group decided they needed the capacity to process a huge variety of information (sales, purchases, accounts, manufacturing, logistics) gathered from different nations within a single integrated Corporate Performance Management context, replacing a whole range of different procedures created in Excel spreadsheets which were revealing severe limits in practicality, security and data traceability.
They needed to compare and monitoring of retail performance between approximately 190 stores across 23 different countries.

Solution

BOARD BI & CPM (new implementation)

Usage

The fashion group chose BOARD BI & CPM due to its superior in ease of use, speed of implementation and the flexibility of applications and because they were the only option able to demonstrate a working proof on concept.
The use of BOARD gradually expanded throughout the company, with various areas adopting the toolkit:
- Operations. Used to track the movement of stock and provided the ability to forecast returns and analyze component and manufacturing costs
- Sales. Uses BOARD to analyze the data for both group and subsidiary sales orders and revenue.
- Retail: Monitor sales figures from stores all over the world, profit & loss in each store and calculation processes to determine break-even points.
- Management Control and Profitability Analysis.
- Consolidation: Individual business units can now look at operative consolidation of analytic accountancy data to monitor variants from budget data.

Results

In under three months they were able to complete a highly successful monitoring project on management and budgeting
Within a year they had managed to centralize and consolidate data in a single integrated Corporate Performance Management and Business Intelligence system, where historically we used Excel and Access: an enormous advance in terms of unequivocal information security and operative efficiency.
BOARD’s programming-free approach has meant that a few “business super-users” have been able to carry forward the entire project.
The client successfully implemented the project in 15 different countries simply by providing telephone training for program users, without any complaints or problems

Implementation & Integration

Instead of adopting a new BI tool, consider upgrading Office and SharePoint.
It often costs less to upgrade existing software than to adopt a new solution. As the first case study demonstrates, MS Office excel with SharePoint Server is a powerful combination. If SharePoint is not currently installed, it may well be on the adoption roadmap for reasons other than BI, after-all it is not hard to justify or demonstrate how SharePoint will deliver business value.
Leverage proofs of concept to build the business case.
The IT department of the fashion group in example 3 initially encountered resistance from business leaders when they proposed BOARD as a BI solution. They won over the opposition not by TCO calculations alone, but by executing precisely targeted proof of concept tasks matching the organization's needs exactly. With commercial demos and trial versions, prospective adopters have much less room to play with the software and test its limits.
Check for integration before selecting a BI solution.
Fortunately, all leading software packages are designed to interoperate well with legacy systems — that is how they remain competitive in the data warehousing market. Nevertheless, it is best to verify that there are tools or proven methods available to ease the pain of migration, and that the legacy systems can connect to the new solution.

Bottom Line

A BI implementation does not have to be a death sentence for the IT budget and you can learn from these three organizations that have made the most of their modest investments.

Additional Resources

In case you are interested in finding out more, about both existing and upcoming capabilities, of the products used in the case studies I have posted some interesting links below for further reading:

Microsoft

SQL Server:
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/default.aspx

New data visualizations in SQL Server Reporting Services:
http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2010/03/09/new-data-visualizations-in-sql-server-reporting-services-2008-r2.aspx

SQL Server 2008 R2 – Managed Self Service Business Intelligence:
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2-self-service-BI.aspx

SharePoint 2010:
http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com

BOARD

BOARD BI Toolkit Overview:
http://www.board.com/business-intelligence/toolkit/IN-overview

BOARD 15 minute dashboard challenge:
http://community.boardbi.com/videos/view/15-minute-dashboard-challenge_46.html