Business intelligence: realizing BI for the masses

By Marin Bezic, SQL BI Product Manager, Microsoft EMEA

Knowledge, as the saying goes, is power, and every organization needs knowledge of their daily operations in order to strengthen their bottom line. For the past three years, growth strategies, rather than cost control, have been the top concern in most industries and geographies, and Business Intelligence (BI) technology has become an essential component to this.

BI systems were initially created to help companies understand the data it generated, and large corporations in particular responded with understandable enthusiasm. However, at its inception, the cost and complexity of the BI tools restricted the potential growth of the BI industry. But the training wheels are now off and the BI market has become one of the fastest growing in the software industry as businesses are able to afford and use these powerful tools.

There are three main trends driving the BI market today: the expanding reach of BI tools farther into companies – BI for the masses; a standardization of BI technologies within companies down to one or few vendors; and the transition of BI tools from simply providing historical views on data, into tools that allow forward looking performance management.

Our customers tell us that BI has reached only 20 percent to 30 percent of the employees in organizations. The reasons: BI technology is too complicated for typical users and it’s also expensive. The costs of acquisition, implementation and maintenance make BI too costly for usage by a large number of employees.

Additionally, as part of an overall need to rein in costs, organizations are moving to standardize the BI technologies it uses. Key decision makers within the same company get varying views on the state of their business because the varied reporting and analysis tools don't always have shared definitions of business logic and metrics. Spending time trying to determine whose data is correct hampers quick decision-making. Rationalization to a few or standardization on one BI vendor helps avoid this.

As companies move to unify their BI tools, they also want those tools to do more. Users want insight into the past, coupled with a view into their real time business operations. They also want these same BI tools to provide the ability to do planning, budgeting, and forecasting faster so that they can more operate more efficiently and predicatively.

Since Microsoft’s entry into the BI market in 1998, our aim has been to provide business insight to all employees in an organization, thus leading to better, faster, more relevant decisions. What differentiates Microsoft from other BI vendors is the ability to deliver pervasive BI. Traditionally, BI has been created for analysts, middle and higher management. Employees in the operations, particularly those on the front line who interact daily with customers, partners, and suppliers, have been neglected as far as BI offerings are concerned. If those employees could leverage BI to make better business decisions, then the whole organization benefits.

Companies no longer want BI to be something that stands alone. They want it to be part of the collaboration process and to include performance management, metrics and key performance indicators. CEOs and CIOs are asking: What’s our vision? What’s our strategy to deliver on that vision? And how is BI going to help us continually answer these critical questions?

So BI for the masses is the mantra. Our strategy is three pronged: to provide end-to-end, integrated BI tools, from server to desktop; to make our offerings enterprise ready with the ability to scale up; and to offer widespread integration with Office, which is what we have done with the launch of the 2007 Office Suite.

We are in an extremely exciting phase of BI and the strides we make will truly entrench BI in a majority of business processes. BI is not going replace all other business applications but it is going to become ubiquitous. Now that’s power.

BIO

Marin Bezic, is the SQL BI Product Manager in Microsoft EMEA, prior to this he was the development manager in the Analysis Services team in SQL Server Business Intelligence Unit. He joined Microsoft in 1997 as software design engineer working on Analysis Services tools. Prior to joining Microsoft, Marin worked for a start-up Lantern Corporation on developing multidimensional data exploration and navigation tools. Marin has M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from Washington University in St Louis.