Business intelligence is very personalized.
Independent of the challenges of getting corporate data collected,
completed, and cleansed, the “right” delivery method is highly
subjective. One user may be satisfied with a static report that simply
delivers information; another user wants the ability to drill into
specific sections of a report to interact with more detail; another
still may want to spend three seconds looking at a picture to determine
whether action is required.
With all of that, how do you get started? The first
step is to recognize that delivery around BI has evolved. It used to be
that you needed to know the users and know what they wanted to see.
That’s changed. Now, business intelligence is much more about putting
tools in the hands of the users and letting them have control over what
they see (thus the slogan “BI for the masses”). In the next few
sections, we highlight various options for BI delivery in SharePoint,
including report storage and delivery, charts, dashboards, scorecards,
and key performance indicators (KPIs). In a later section, we discuss
your options and how to select the delivery choice that is most
appropriate.
Reports
It is pretty safe say that every person in an
organization, independent of role or responsibilities, interacts with
some type of report. In the “old days” reports were delivered in paper
form through interoffice mail or by printing a hardcopy. With
technology advances, this has changed so that most report delivery occurs through e-mail attachments or interacting directly with an online system.
At the highest level, there are two types of
reports, static and dynamic. A static report is a presentation of
information in locked-down view, meaning the reader can only see the
information in the format that is shown and is only exposed to the
level of detail provided on that report. Think of it as a .pdf file (a
401K statement, for example). The report itself may have been generated
from any enterprise system. A dynamic report is more flexible. It
allows the user to manipulate the presentation of data and/or access
detail that may not have been presented in the default view. Think of a
sales performance report. Perhaps the presentation is revenue per
region, but the user is allowed to drill into an individual office or
maybe request additional supplemental detail by checking a checkbox.
Again, this report may have been generated from any number of external
systems.
From a SharePoint perspective, the type of report or
the data source is irrelevant. Again, think of SharePoint as the
delivery tool. How does it help? While we stated earlier that
SharePoint is not a data repository, it is
a document repository. And reports are documents! This means that you
can deliver corporate reports by storing them in SharePoint. You may
get the reports into SharePoint manually or provide access to a
reporting source like Reporting Services or through custom development.
The value of placing reports in SharePoint versus e-mailing them
directly to users or placing them on a network drive is plentiful. A
SharePoint document (report) library
Can be secured, either at the library or
item (report) level. This allows you to easily apply permissions so the
reports are only seen by the appropriate resources.
Is crawled by SharePoint’s search engine so reports can be returned in search results.
Has
version control so that as reports are updated, the new version
overlays the old and there is no confusion about which is the most
current version.
Can meet compliance
requirements through defined document management workflows to control
approval, publication, and disposition.
Is familiar to users in an existing SharePoint environment, so it is easier to train users on how to access new reports.
Has alerts so users can be notified of new or updated reports.
In
addition, SharePoint has very tight integration with SQL Server
Reporting Services so that reports generated in SSRS can be shown in
the context of a SharePoint portal and can provide users with a single
access point for reports and supplemental structured and unstructured
data.
Charts
Reports are text-based. That means they contain
characters and numbers and are formatted in a certain way for
presentation. Another way to show data is in a graph. A pie chart or
bar chart can “tell a story” with fewer words and numbers than a
traditional report. The value of a chart is that it leverages a visual
indicator to quickly highlight specific data elements (i.e., sales are
way down this year because the current year bar is much smaller than
last year’s). Business users have long been familiar with charts
through their use of Microsoft Excel. Excel provides an easy way to
transform data into a picture.
From a SharePoint perspective, there are three main
ways to present these charts as part of a business intelligence
solution. The first and simplest is to store the spreadsheet that
contains the chart(s) in a document library (similar to the Reports
section). This requires very little effort but forces the user to click
the “right” file and launch Excel on the desktop. A second choice is to
use a third-party charting tool that offers SharePoint integration
where the charts are actually Web Parts that have been configured to
point to a specific data source and present results in a specific way.
The benefit here is that the user interface is much richer, and access
to the visual indicators is faster. The challenge is that this requires
an additional purchase and at least some level of training in the
third-party solution. Excel Services requires that the
organization has the Enterprise version of SharePoint Server 2010. It
allows users in Excel to publish a chart or collection of charts
directly from Excel and have them rendered directly into SharePoint.
This offers the rich and instant presentation without the overhead of
an additional software solution.
Dashboards
Dashboards can be used to show, in real time, how an
organization (or, more often, a part of an organization) is performing
against tactical goals. Most often the metrics that are displayed in a dashboard reflect data that is constantly
changing (how many support calls do we have in queue? how many units
have we manufactured today?). Dashboards are most often watched by
members in the organization who are responsible for specific day-to-day
goals.
The information used in a dashboard is usually “raw”
data, but in an effective dashboard it is displayed in such a way that
there is an instant recognition of performance against a target. So,
for instance, if there are fewer than 5 support calls in queue, we can
show the number 5 in green; if there are 6 to 20, we can show the
number in yellow; and if there are more than 20, we can show the number
in red. This commonly understood color scheme provides instant feedback
to supervisors or staff members on how they are doing at any moment in
time. At a glance, someone can look at a dashboard to spot the trouble
areas and do further investigation or take action. The use of gauges or
progress bars or charts can also provide visual cues about the
information that changes regularly.
The most critical action to perform before setting
up a dashboard is to identify which metrics are going to help drive the
organization’s performance. Too often, information like the current
weather or the company’s stock ticker is dropped onto a dashboard
because they are easy to create. However, unless you are in the
snowplow business, a weather dashboard is not likely to provide a
metric that drives performance.
Dashboards are not one size fits all. Different
people in the organization need to see different information to
understand performance. Sometimes this just means a different level of
granularity (how many support calls for software product X versus
software product Y versus for all software products), but it can also
mean different metrics for different parts of the organization. Because
of this, you need to carefully plan so that you are sure that you are
providing the right information to the right people at the right time
in your dashboards.
Scorecards
Scorecards are another example of BI tools that can be used to show how an organization is performing against strategic
goals. The metrics are generally from a snapshot in time rather than
real time. The metrics that are contained in a scorecard also can be
viewed from an overall organizational level (how are we doing against
our revenue goals for the year?) or cascaded down to the individual
level (how much have I sold this year?). Scorecards are usually watched
most closely at the top level of an organization.
As
with dashboards, the most important step in creating a scorecard is to
do careful analysis. An organization’s strategy is almost always
difficult to articulate outside the board room. Scorecards are a way to
make strategy real to everyone in the organization. If our strategy is
to be the best and most well-known service provider in a specific
industry, then we need to identify what metrics the organization should
monitor to understand how you are doing against that strategy.
Scorecards have been around for a long time, and many organizations
think that they have a handle on theirs if they are watching financial
metrics. However, it is just as important to watch metrics that show
how the organization is performing from a customer perspective, from a
business process perspective, and from a learning and growth
perspective. The reasons for this are many. Revenue might be going
through the roof, but if the staff is leaving in droves, there’s a
problem. If profits are way up but no one can understand when they
should report a critical defect, then we have a problem.
The visual representation of scorecards is similar
to dashboards but is usually simpler. The red/yellow/green approach is
the most common, given that users are interested in how they are
performing against a fixed set of metrics at a specific time period.
The visuals won’t change in real time but will change on a periodic
basis, whatever period makes sense for the overall organization.
Usually these periods are monthly because that coincides with financial
reporting periods, and monthly reporting is well-ingrained in the
corporate psyche.
Let’s assume that you have done all of the upfront
analysis for your dashboards and scorecards (no small feat, but too
large a set of topics to cover here). Once you have SharePoint up and
running, enabling collaboration and teamwork across the enterprise,
it’s time to consider using the platform as a basis for business
intelligence. SharePoint provides a rich set of new tools to facilitate
building up your dashboards and scorecards.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
A Key Performance Indicator is one element of a
scorecard. Organizations use KPIs to monitor business activity and
performance. Simply stated, KPIs are metrics (data values) that are
compared against a benchmark and scored. KPI indicators (also known as
Status Indicators) are intended to spur action. If the sale KPI is red,
it indicates that an issue has arisen and that
action is required. Status Indicator Lists are one way to implement a
simple dashboard or scorecard. A scorecard is more formal and has more
rollup and drilldown capabilities that allow for views into supporting
metrics. Status Indicator lists in SharePoint are meant to be simpler.
They are linear and represent the presentation of a group of items that
share a common data point (that is, they all relate to the
organization).
Traditionally, corporate executives have used KPIs
to get a “pulse” on business performance. Examples include sales
pipeline, revenue, and products sold (all for a specific point in
time). Ever increasingly, however, all levels of an organization are
being exposed to KPI lists as a way to present performance data. Think
of project teams being exposed to project performance (utilization or
budget versus actual) in a master list. The power of a KPI list is that
it presents, in a very simple interface, information about collected
data as measured against predefined goals. One of the key challenges
about any sort of dashboard or scorecard is that it seeks to aggregate
a wide variety of data—data that may come from multiple systems. Worse
yet, the necessary data may not exist in any systems—or be very complex
to calculate or locate. Presenting the red/yellow/green on a scale is
often the easy part. Defining and locating the actual data is the hard
part.
In SharePoint Server 2010, Key Performance Indicators are called Status Indicators.
Status Indicator lists allow you to create a graphical representation
of the status of the business activity or performance attribute you are
measuring. Like scorecards, a traditional KPI list typically has three
main color codings (although it is possible to use a number of
graphical icons, including smiley and sad faces):
