SharePoint and BI : Better Together !!

I feel very motivated by the response to our last BI Capabilities of SharePoint webinar. My intuition is starting to turn into a belief that data analysis and management is going to gain significant momentum for two key reasons:

Management Pressure:

Upper and mid management will continue to be under pressure to show value by cutting cost and increasing efficiency. This in turn will put pressure on IT to evolve their BI strategy to include Self-service BI so as not to get bogged down by increase in demand. Self-service BI will be their savior as they will not be able to scale up by hiring more people because of continued cost pressure.

To make sense out of the information explosion:

Collaboration features in tools like SharePoint are resulting in an unprecedented explosion of information. Organizations will be hard pressed to make sense out of all that information for multiple reasons, including:

• Legal Liability
• Getting Pulse of Employees Sentiments
• Knowledge Sharing
• Data Quality and Accuracy
• Many more

I believe, SharePoint is uniquely placed to capitalize on this opportunity. I cannot think of a better delivery engine for all this data analysis and mining capabilities. Also SQL Server 12 and Power View are bringing the next level of coolness.

Here are few slides that I came up that map various Self-Service state that organizations can choose depending upon their unique requirements, and components from Microsoft BI stack that can enable those requirements. I have included only the delivery components in the stack, and therefore SSIS, SSAS and other underlying components are missing.

The BI Continuum

Capabilities Mapped to target BI Strategy options

Technology Enablers Mapped to Target BI States

I am tempted to add the Cloud-Azure dimension to the Microsoft BI story, but I’ll do that in another post.

Cheers!!